Linn Ternsjö

Doktorand

A Continuum of Choices and Constraints: Women’s Everyday Working Lives and Sense of Agency in the Ethiopian Garment Industry

Författare

Linn Ternsjö

Summary, in English

This study critically engages with the assumption that factory jobs will benefit both women themselves and overall development in Ethiopia, whose industrial policy is dedicated to labor-intensive light manufacturing. Drawing on fieldwork data collected in and around an export-oriented garment factory, it delves into the impact of women’s employment on their intra-household decision-making power, agency, and well-being. By taking a feminist political economy approach centered on the dynamics of social reproduction in the everyday, the findings add nuance to mainstream policy discourses by showing that despite miserable working conditions, different kinds of agency emerge and are mediated by gender norms and various worker identities beyond the factory floor.

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