LEARNING TO MANAGE THE FACTORY FLOOR IN ETHIOPIA: SKILLS, WORK CULTURES AND ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES IN ETHIOPIA'S LIGHT MANUFACTURING

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In African countries like Ethiopia, the prospects for industrialization through the development of light manufacturing led by foreign direct investment have substantially improved in the past ten years. Many industrial parks and new foreign investors have been established to meet the ambitious industrialization goals of Ethiopia. This development entails a number of critical requirements in terms of infrastructure, policy incentives and workforce skills. Although Ethiopia is supposed to have a comparative advantage in light manufacturing because of low labour costs and the plentiful availability of labour, the reality in the last few years is that attracting, training and retaining a suitable industrial labour force is not as simple as it would seem. Paradoxically, labour constraints may impair the achievement of the ambitious industrialization goals of Ethiopia and other African countries. Labour outcomes and industrial relations depend much on workplace arrangements and the broader labour market context of each sector and country. Organizational and managerial capabilities are, in this regard, critical to understanding some of the labour challenges that firms face, especially in the case of new foreign firms investing in new sourcing countries as in the textile and garment (T&G) sector in Ethiopia. These are firms that are subject to tight competitive pressures from the global production networks in which they are integrated or willing to join. The factories starting in Ethiopia face the twin challenge of attracting a trainable and motivated workforce in a context of limited industrial development and meeting the productivity and quality imperatives of global production networks. The role of low and middle-level managers seems to be critical in these nodes of the chain as they constitute the interface between the tight demands coming from top management and the responses and demands from production workers. Indeed, some of the key labour problems confronted by new investors, such as high labour turnover, relatively lower than expected staff retention and labour conflict, were linked to the limited progress in incorporating a suitable local managerial force at different levels of factory management and to the difficulties in labour relations when expat managers had to manage/supervise local workers. This was considered by most stakeholders, especially the Ethiopian government (particularly the EIC and the IPDC) as well as private investors' groups, a significant challenge that required some remedy action. The initial 2015-2019 project focused primarily on the experiences and working conditions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, i.e. the bulk of workers employed by companies in the construction and manufacturing sectors. However, our qualitative research and interviews with factory managers stressed the equal importance of skilled and management labour force for the success of these industries. These interviews corroborated the importance of and constraints in finding and retaining high-quality local managers for factory floor operations. This is consistent with similar findings from other studies of industrialization in developing countries and diagnostic research by ILO in Ethiopia. We there propose to extend our current research to deepen the understanding of the current and past experiences of existing and especially new emerging industrial firms in finding, developing and retaining a skilled and managerial workforce, in order to improve the sustainability of the firm in the country and labour relations at the workplace. We will ask questions and do qualitative research about the constraints on hiring and retaining Ethiopian managers and the processes of skill transfer that have worked best to incorporate this labour force at the factory floor level. We will also compile relevant data from existing datasets emerging from other studies that have been conducted in the last 5 years in Ethiopia.