Assessing the Outcomes in Africa’s SEZs
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African countries struggle with highly inflexible labor markets, which causes firms to make greater use of temporary workers. Thus, the levels of temporary workers reported in Table 3.8 may reflect, more than anything, that the African zones have not resolved the problem of rigid labor markets. In the case of Senegal, for example, an SEZ-specific relaxation of the rules for hiring temporary workers22 has led many firms to rely almost exclusively on temporary workers. The first and second columns of Table 3.8 show the SEZ and national unionization rates. Overall, union participation in zones (as reported by the surveyed firms) is somewhat lower than the national rates, with the exception of Senegal and Bangladesh. Within the African programs, union membership is particularly low in the Kenyan and Nigerian programs. This is perhaps not surprising, given the historical legal treatment of unions in these zone programs. The Nigerian free zone law prohibits strikes and lockouts for a period of 10 years after a company begins its activities in a given EPZ. The law also states that employer-employee disputes are not to be handled by trade unions but rather by the authorities who manage these zones.23 In Kenya, until 2005, workers in the EPZs were prohibited from joining unions or engaging in collective bargaining. A wide range of negative work quality and social consequences are common across many of the zones under study, including the following: • Lack of job advancement opportunities: A common problem across most zone programs is the lack of mobility of production workers into supervisory positions. This is particularly true for women, who dominate the production workforce in many SEZ companies but are poorly represented in supervisory and managerial positions (see below). • Difficult work hours and shift structures: In Honduras, for example, workers in the maquila factories typically work 11–12 hours a day, four days in a row, before having four days of rest. This scheme has led to some adverse social implications as many maquila workers, lacking a living wage, take a second job for the days they have off. • Lack of social infrastructure: Most of the large zones locate in or near major metropolitan areas but attract their workforces from distant rural communities. This has led to large-scale migration in some countries (e.g., Honduras and Lesotho) and put significant pressure on the already weak social infrastructure, particularly regarding the provision of as decent housing, education, and health services. It has also contributed to health problems such as HIV (in Lesotho, an estimated 40% of the apparel workforce is affected by HIV).