When the General Assembly of the Confederation of Ethiopian Trade Unions (CETU) met in December 2025, it confirmed that the membership of its affiliated unions had, for the first time in Ethiopian history, surpassed one million workers, organized in 2,653 basic enterprise unions.

This denotes remarkable growth for a trade union movement whose membership figures hardly changed between the mid-1980s and the early 2010s, remaining stagnant at around 300,000 members.

In the most recent Ethiopian calendrical year alone, a net total of 97,081 new members joined the trade union movement and 274 new basic unions were founded. Meanwhile, CETU established five new branch offices in different regions, bringing the total to twelve, with plans to expand to seventeen during the current year.

The explosive growth of trade unions in Ethiopia comes against the backdrop of recurring labor unrest from below. In 2025, several high-profile strikes took place, including those among DHL workers and employees of a labor contractor for Safaricom.

Public health workers across the country, who are classified as civil servants and thus denied the right to unionize, also undertook an unprecedented strike that, while technically a wildcat action, was coordinated by the Ethiopian Health Professionals Association.

The Latest Phase

The current round of worker mobilization in Ethiopia represents the latest phase in a process that stretches back to the mid-2010s. It builds upon earlier cycles of mobilization while achieving a quantitatively higher scale.

It unsettles two widely held assumptions that operate at different levels. First, it challenges the idea that ethnic solidarities constitute the sole meaningful axis of mobilization in Ethiopia’s contemporary predicament. In doing so, it opens space for us to consider the reemergence of cross-ethnic class solidarities as a basis for reconstituting Ethiopia’s torn social fabric.

Second, it challenges the simplistic, indeed rather banal, yet predominant notion of a global decline of labor movements, which draws upon a selective range of cases. The generalized declinist argument is mainly substantiated with reference to developments in Europe and settler-colonial societies. China, for example, which has roughly 400 million unionized workers, must be excluded from the picture for the notion of a global decline to make numerical sense.

From Empire to Revolution

To make sense of the contemporary phase of labor mobilization in Ethiopia, one has to place it in the context of the movement’s long-term trajectory and past phases. When the Ethiopian labor movement emerged as a countrywide force in the late 1950s and early ’60s, it did so under the rule of an absolute monarchy that presided over a centralized empire-state composed of diverse nations and nationalities, with a political economy dominated by agrarian landlord interests.

The segments of the waged working population that were permitted to unionize were small and largely confined to urban centers and foreign-owned enterprises. Large sections of the workforce, including agrarian laborers, civil servants, and small-scale service employees, were legally barred from doing so. Nevertheless, the movement’s small size did not prevent it from developing strong militant traits, and strike activity was commonplace.

In 1963, the first central confederation of Ethiopian labor was formed. It immediately became a flash point for competing pressures: state repression (which forced the confederation’s popular leadership to resign the year after its founding), foreign intervention (particularly from the AFL-CIO’s African American Labor Center and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions), bureaucratic consolidation at the top, and rank-and-file pressure from below. Within this tense constellation, an increasingly radical current emerged and gained strength during the 1960s and early ’70s.

By 1973, the radical opposition, largely composed of younger labor activists and workers from Addis Ababa and Eritrea, was ascendant and seriously challenging the moderate leadership. That year, strike activity, which had been a constant feature of the 1960s, exploded. In March 1974, this militancy culminated in a highly successful general strike against the imperial state, dramatically raising the movement’s prestige and triggering a membership surge. Whereas total union membership had stood at 73,000 in 1973, it now almost tripled, reaching 200,000 the following year.

Meanwhile, the popular movement that would culminate in the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974 was gathering force. By September, the emperor had been deposed and the military junta known as the Derg had come to power. It immediately came into conflict with a confident and radicalized labor movement that took a position far to the left of the Derg, demanding that it hand over political power to representatives of the masses, along with control over workplaces to the workers themselves.

After escalating confrontations with the regime, including general strikes in September 1974 and September 1975, the confederation was banned. Several years of militant resistance and strikes followed, organized at the basic union level by clandestine networks. The radical labor movement was eventually crushed amid intense and violent repression. In 1977, the Derg established an entirely state-controlled trade union organization. Instead of representing labor, it was tasked with controlling it, a task that it performed effectively until the end of the 1980s.

After the Derg

By the late 1980s, unrest had begun to reemerge among workers whose real wages had declined precipitously since the 1974 revolution, dropping by more than half in real terms. This collapse was no accident. While the revolution had profoundly transformed Ethiopia’s political economy by nationalizing all land and abolishing landlordism, it had shifted demands for surplus extraction onto waged workers, ushering in conditions that were conducive to renewed labor militancy.

Nevertheless, it was not until the fall of the Derg regime and the coming to power of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in 1991 that the labor movement began to revive in earnest. This revival was triggered by new purges of unions and repression of workers carried out by the new authorities as well as factory closures and mass retrenchments.

Unlike the Derg, the EPRDF made no pretense of representing labor. It saw itself instead as the representative of oppressed nationalities, embodied in an idealized depiction of the peasantry. The labor movement’s refusal to mirror the EPRDF and the federal state it sought to construct — in other words, to organize along national or regional lines rather than countrywide sectoral ones — further deepened the regime’s hostility.

Workers and labor activists, meanwhile, networked in impromptu constellations and sought to erect defensive barriers against encroachments on unions and workers’ rights in the new political environment of EPRDF rule. These efforts culminated in the formation of a new, countrywide labor center in 1993: CETU.

Containment and Revival

The EPRDF’s assault on the already precarious position of labor was always on the cards, but two developments hastened it. First, the government’s program of deregulation, liberalization, and privatization was accelerated by its agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for loans that were conditional on structural adjustment measures, increasing pressure on workers. Second, in September 1994, CETU voiced concerns over the implementation of the IMF-backed program and its structural adjustment goals. The EPRDF interpreted this as open opposition and set about removing CETU’s leadership and installing a loyalist one.

The reconstituted CETU that emerged in 1997 was a yellow, thoroughly state-controlled union that did not even protest the most blatant violations of trade union and labor rights. Over the following decade, it was widely seen as irrelevant by workers and external observers alike, and it was ridiculed in the press for failing even to feign independence or show any meaningful interest in defending workers’ rights.

By the 2010s, as state control eroded and rank-and-file militancy revived, a more vibrant movement began to emerge. This revival unfolded alongside government efforts to expand export-oriented manufacturing, including industrial parks, which created new pockets of concentrated wage labor and new sites of contestation. Strike activity rose precipitously as union officials advanced more assertive demands.

Meanwhile, organizing efforts gathered pace, resulting in a significant uptick in union membership. By 2017, unrest had developed into a full-fledged strike wave, and that year CETU demonstrated its newfound independence by warning that it would call a general strike unless the government withdrew and renegotiated a new labor law bill before parliament.

Taken aback by this display of assertiveness, the government conceded and withdrew the bill, which was later renegotiated and passed on terms that were far more favorable to labor. This, in turn, produced another surge in membership and accelerated workplace unrest.

The Current Conjuncture

In 2020, the global pandemic and the outbreak of civil war in Ethiopia disrupted labor mobilization. Industrial action slowed, organizational expansion stalled, and the terrain became markedly more hostile.

Yet all signs suggest that the setback was temporary. By 2022, CETU, aided in part by wildcat strikers, had succeeded in prying open industrial parks to unionization — a long-standing strategic objective.

Since then, unions have pushed to organize new segments of the workforce, including domestic workers, and to press for the implementation of minimum wage provisions. Dispersed collective action continues across sectors, and the more assertive posture of organized labor has attracted growing ranks of members.

These advances are all the more striking when considered against the structure of Ethiopia’s political economy. The economic base consists predominantly of peasant agriculture. In urban areas, workers in the vast informal sector are excluded from unionization.

Even within the formal economy, significant restrictions on freedom of association persist. Public servants — a broadly defined category that in Ethiopia includes teachers and public health workers — are likewise prohibited from forming unions.

Surpassing Expectations

These structural features narrow the terrain on which organized labor can operate. Such problems are compounded by pronounced ethnic polarization and conflict, which has been consistently instrumentalized and fanned by a predatory ruling class, further complicating prospects for cross-national class mobilization.

Because of these structural and political constraints, reinforced by the widespread assumption of global labor decline, the expectations observers have placed on Ethiopian labor in recent years have tended to be modest, if not openly negative. Numerous accounts have portrayed the movement as persistently weak and inconsequential. Yet those expectations have proven wrong.

The strike of health workers provides a clear example of how mass collective action can resonate with Ethiopian working people. Because they are predominantly state employees, they labor under broadly similar conditions across regions. In striking, they drew attention to these woeful conditions, reminding working Ethiopians of all nationalities that they share a common predicament.

The proliferation of armed conflicts and the intensification of state predation through forced expulsions, land seizures, and punitive taxation have revealed that Ethiopians share a common subjection to the same predatory ruling class and regime. At the same time, the health workers’ strike has underscored the fact that working people also share common social and material conditions and interests.

Beyond the Decline Narrative

As noted above and as the Ethiopian example confirms, the claim that the global labor movement is in decline rests on shaky foundations. More important than its empirical weaknesses, however, are its political effects. This perspective introduces a distorting filter: by treating decline as the universal pattern with particular advances as exceptions to the rule, it conceals the real potential of labor movements in our time and breeds defeatism.

Moreover, when we generalize assumptions derived mainly from developments in Europe and settler colonies to the rest of the world, it has two effects. First, those assumptions impose a Eurocentric lens on the global labor movement, treating a context-specific experience of decline as if it were universal. Second, they flatten the stark variation and sharply contrasting tendencies that characterize labor movements within and across regions, including between neighboring African countries.

In Africa alone, there are several countries where contemporary labor movements are vibrant — Ethiopia being just one of them — and have been quite successful in different ways recently. In Ghana, for example, union membership has grown and unions have secured significant wage increases through coordinated national action, while in Nigeria, mass strikes have forced both the government and major private employers such as Dangote to make significant concessions to union demands.

These are only illustrative cases. But there are also countries, such as Zimbabwe and Tanzania, in which labor movements indeed appear to have grown weaker in recent times, with membership in decline. In many African countries, moreover, there is an urgent need for concrete investigation into the contemporary conditions of labor movements and the prevalence of labor militancy — an area of inquiry that receives far too little attention.

Beyond the dominant narrative of global decline, there is still, to use Mike Ely’s evocative words, “a beautiful blue planet crammed with contradiction and life” out there. Rather than forcing that reality into a flattened, ultimately Eurocentric account, the real question we should ask is why labor movements advance in some places and falter in others — including in comparable and even neighboring countries. That could reveal what is possible and where — not to mention what can be done to consolidate gains, strengthen, and grow the movement where conditions permit, or rebuild it where they do not.

The Ethiopian case demonstrates that labor movements do not merely advance or decline according to universal trends. Their fortunes are determined by strategic choices made within specific political economies, class configurations, and historical conjunctures. The question is not whether labor is in global decline but under what conditions, how, and where it can mobilize, expand, and exert power.