First encounters with industrial work: Kombolcha Industrial Park
Authors: Aspen Harald 
Published: April 2023

The new industrial park in Kombolcha, South Wälo is one of a number of its kind which have recently been established in various regions of Ethiopia, as part of the government’s endeavor to boost industrialization and non-agricultural employment in the country by attracting foreign manufacturing companies. Kombolcha Industrial Park (KIP) is located in South Wälo, a region probably more widely known for its famines than for industrial development. In recent years the region has seen large scale infrastructural developments, especially the new airport, which opened in 2014, and the railway, which was under construction at the time of fieldwork. Coupled with a general economic growth in the country, this has contributed to an unprecedented population growth in Kombolcha and the nearby administrative centre of South Wälo, Dessie, even before the establishment of KIP. The industrial park alone is expected to employ about 20,000 workers when it is fully operational. Kombolcha and Dessie combined also host a number of teaching institutions, spanning from a full-fledged university with campuses in both towns, to technical and vocational training institutes, many of which offering teaching programmes tailored for industrial needs. That Kombolcha for decades has been a centre of textile industry, with the Kombolcha Textile factory, employing about 2,000 workers, as a cornerstone company, most probably accounts for the fact that many of the teaching institutions in the area educate workers for the textile industry. Hence, one might believe that recruitment to KIP of competent work force would be an easy task, even if it was mandatory for the new industrial companies in KIP to recruit their employees locally. The enterprise described here, however, specialized in leather handbags, and therefore needed to provide further specialized training for their newly recruited workforce. The article is based on observations of the start-up of the very first foreign company in Kombolcha Industrial Park, a South Korean manufacturer of leather hand bags for the international up-market, and which the author was able to follow intermittently from the instalment of machineries and training of the first cohort of machine operators in early 2018 until it was fully operational a year later. The article provides a brief account of issues of recruitment and training of local workers to industrial work in a multicultural setting. Both the management and the workers can be described as pioneers : the management being first to operate a foreign company in this part of the country, under the auspices of the Industrial Parks Development Corporation of Ethiopia (IPDC) and in close contact with and controlled by a number of national and district level authorities, and with a workforce they had little prior knowledge about, and, on the other hand, the workers, unused as they were to industrial work in an international setting and with expectations, especially about wage levels, that were far from being met when they encountered the realities of working in the factory. The article deals with the major stress points as seen both from the perspective of the management and of the workers. For the management the level of competence and stability of the workers were initial points of concern. For the workers, the main reason for dissatisfaction was the wage levels they were offered. On top of this, the international work environment in the factory, with Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and Ethiopian employees and managers, accounted for problems related to language barriers and differences in work culture. It seems, however, that many problems were overcome a year after start-up ; the turnover of workers was relatively low, compared with other industrial parks in Ethiopia, and the quality of the work (and products) was reported by the management to be good. The label “ Made in Ethiopia” placed on up-market leather bag brands represented a victory for the factory and its management and employees, but a vulnerable one, given the dependence on low wages, reliable services and, not least, political stability. The latter part of the article deals with lessons learned about doing ethnographic fieldwork in a setting like this. Because the author approached the factory management prior to production start-up, contact with the international management group and the first Ethiopian trainees, who had been to Vietnam for training and were later called “ juniors,” indicating their potential path of career in the factory, was informal and unrestrained. Gradually, as proper production started and several production lines were in operation, middle managers were opposed to the presence of researchers in the factory hall, and it became obvious that the terms for doing fieldwork in the factory had to be negotiated and settled. Although this was an exploratory study, it gave insights to issues that need to be dealt with if international industry in Ethiopia is to be studied by Ethiopian and international scholars – which they should, also by anthropologists and other social scientists.