Collective Representation in New Production Sites: How the Ethiopian Apparel Export Industry Was Unionized

In this paper we analyse the factors that led to the recent unionisation drive in Ethiopia’s apparel export industry. In the past ten years Ethiopia has emerged as a growing production location for international firms linked into the global apparel value chain. Ethiopia has successfully attracted foreign firms supplying apparel buyers in the US and the EU into a series of new, mostly government-owned, industrial parks. These supplier firms came to Ethiopia seeking lower labour costs and easier access to US markets. Global buyers, the lead firms of the apparel sector, typically push supplier firms to accept a combination of low margins and demanding delivery schedules, in turn incentivising supplier firms to suppress wage growth and limit workers’ collective representation. Resistance to unionisation in supplier firms is common in the sector and was initially supported by the Ethiopian government, which limited union access to industrial parks. The Ethiopian apparel export sector has nonetheless recently witnessed a remarkably successful unionisation drive and most firms in the country’s industrial parks now have factory-level unions linked to higher-level union federations.

Drawing on theoretical approaches to labour regimes and sources of workers’ power (Wright, 2000; Silver, 2003; Burawoy, 1985; Schmalz, Ludwig & Webster, 2018), mobilisation theory (Kelly, 1998), and recent extensions of value chain theory (Marslev, Staritz & Raj-Reicherts, 2022) we develop a new analytical framework to explain how the resistance of key stakeholders to unionisation was overcome. Empirically, we draw on two matched firm and worker surveys of over 1,000 workers in apparel firms conducted in 2018 and 2023, key informant interviews with company managers, government officials, UN officials, and trade union leaders, as well as semi-structured interviews with trade unionists at factory level.