Towards Decent Employment or a Destitute Livelihood? The Dynamics of the Agrarian Question of Labor in Ethiopia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the demand for industrial labor among dispossessed peasants and how the non-absorption of peasants’ labor into industrial production intertwined in and around the Bole Lemi industrial park (BLIP) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The scores of peasants who were dispossessed to enable the establishment of BLIP were promised to get compensatory jobs. The park's expansion ensures capital accumulation for the companies but produces a ‘pile of pain’ for the dispossessed peasants. Drawing on fieldwork in Addis Ababa, this article illustrates that the promised transformation of dispossessed peasants’ lives from farm to factory and rural to urban lifestyle did not happen. This is due to companies’ ignorance of dispossessed peasants’ labor because they are illiterate, ‘unskilled’ and beyond the productive capitalist age as well as companies’ preference for employing young women. While rural women migrate to the city for industrial labor, on the contrary, the dispossessed peasants living in Addis Ababa are seasonally ‘returning to the farm’ as daily laborers in rural areas known for their labor shortages. The peasants become surplus to industrial production due to capitalists’Footnote2 preference for employing young women of ‘productive age’ (roughly between 15-30). As a result, a new precarious peasant class of ‘three nos’ – no land, no work, and no hope – is emerging. The aspiration, hope and expectation of modernity – city lifestyle, proletarianization and improvement in livelihoods turned into the reality of under/unemployment and migration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".