Ethiopia’s Trade Union Movement Is Growing Stronger
Over the last decade, Ethiopia’s trade unions have experienced impressive growth, more than doubling their membership. Ethiopia and other African states with growing unions cut against the idea that organized labor is facing global decline.
Chanyalew Aweke, a labor organizer with the Confederation of Ethiopian Trade Unions, during an interview on October 2, 2019. (Eyerusalem Jiregna / AFP via Getty Images)
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.
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