"Angry workers spurn Ethiopia's 'industrial revolution'"

Zemen Zerihun thought he'd left farming behind and found the ticket to a better life when he began a job cutting fabric for a clothing company at a massive industrial park in southern Ethiopia. But the 22-year-old ended up quitting within months, weary of working eight hours a day, six days a week and still not making ends meet earning $35 a month. Managers were so strict they would go into bathrooms and yank out workers deemed to be taking too long, he said. His supervisor would loudly berate him as "slow" and "lazy" when he failed to keep pace on the production line, he told AFP."After I joined the company, I suffered," he said. "The supervisors treat you like animals."Experiences like his highlight a major challenge facing Ethiopia's push to embrace industrialisation and become less dependant on agriculture...

The $26 monthly base pay at Hawassa makes Ethiopian garment workers the lowest paid in the world, the NYU Stern Center report said. Though the amount is not uncommon for entry-level employees in a country with no minimum wage, workers say it barely covers food, transport and rent. Even those leasing cramped apartments with three or four co-workers and sleeping in shifts on shared mattresses say they don't make a decent living. Eight months after resigning, Zemen is living with his family and still looking for a new job, but he has no regrets. He'd rather grow food for himself on the family farm than toil at the factory which he'd initially seen as his escape, he said.