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 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.
The current round of worker mobilization in Ethiopia represents the latest phase in a process that stretches back to the mid-2010s.
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…
Auteur: Samuel Andreas Admasie
