Migrant housing

Types of ZSR

How ZSR can be implemented:

A range of accommodation options for migrant workers should be factored into zone planning at an early stage.
Housing should ensure migrants’ safety but not impose undue restrictions on their rights and freedoms, including movement within the local area.
Migrant housing should meet minimum conditions of affordability, decent quality and sanitary living conditions to ensure worker health and decrease turnover.
Local residents should be supported to construct good quality accommodation for migrants within local communities, and to lease it at affordable rates.

Overview of the problem:

There are two distinct forms of migrant accommodation in and around SEZs. The first option is for migrants to find local accommodation themselves, for example in local urban villages. This may benefit local communities through the emergence of a rental economy that generates additional income for local families and households. It may also prevent excessive labour control by employers, since migrants live independently. Yet, the demand for migrant accommodation can result in the construction of informal settlements and shantytowns. Requiring that migrants find their own local accommodation can also lead to recruitment difficulties, with a lack of suitable and affordable housing preventing some migrant workers from taking up jobs.

A second option is to house migrants in designated hostels, run by factories themselves or outsourced to private hostel providers. These dormitories can be located on the sites of the factories or nearby, with transportation provided between the factory and the hostel. The construction of factory dormitories allows firms to attract workers who would otherwise not be able to find available, affordable and safe accommodation in the areas around SEZs. Such dormitories and are particularly useful in remotely located SEZs where local accommodation options are insufficient. In some cases, dormitories have been constructed through necessity, such as to provide a contained labour force during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Such arrangements are often referred to as “dormitory labour regimes”, as they make labour readily and flexibly available for factory work, potentially 24 hours a day. They allow for the imposition of strict labour discipline, including ensuring that workers attend work daily and on time, and can prevent migrant workers from seeking employment elsewhere. But such regimes can become repressive and impose harsh restrictions on personal rights and freedoms of the migrant workers, such as curtailing and regulating their freedom of movement outside of the hostels during times when they are off work, with concerns for their safety often indicated as the reason for imposing restrictions. Firm and hostel managers become de facto governors of their workers’ living spaces. Living conditions in migrant hostels can be very poor.

Since SEZs tend to operate as semi-autonomous territorial units in which employment conditions in SEZs may be disconnected from local norms, regulatory frameworks and the possibility of labour unionisation, they tend to operate as semi-autonomous territorial units such that the rights of those who live (as well as work) within them become uncertain and unenforceable. This is a particularly acute issue for migrant labourers who are often unfamiliar with local labour regulations, lack social support networks, and may not speak local languages, thus increasing their dependence on their employer.

Examples:

Mekelle Industrial Park, Ethiopia:

The provision of dormitories in the Mekelle Industrial Park in Tigray region of Ethiopia was initiated because of ongoing conflict that prevented migrant workers from reporting to work in the region’s industrial parks (Sahlu, 2021). Alternative local forms of accommodation were sparse, and new housing developments around the industrial park were unaffordable to low-income migrant workers (Gonder, 2017). Other industrial parks in Ethiopia also began to offer dormitory accommodation to migrant workers during Covid-19 lockdowns to facilitate continued production (Olander, 2024). However, the Ethiopian government’s stance on factory dormitories has been ambivalent, because of concerns over potentially enhanced labour exploitation. However, expecting workers to find private rental accommodation leads to recruitment difficulties, with a lack of suitable and affordable housing preventing some migrant workers from taking up positions (Oya & Schaefer, 2023).

Hawassa Industrial Park, Ethiopia:

The Ethiopian state has aimed to construct housing for 6,500 workers in its Hawassa Industrial Park (Ethiopian Monitor, 2021). This form of accommodation will differ from the more usual form of industrial dormitory that is attached to a specific firm. It remains to be seen how this zone-based form of accommodation will compare to factory dormitories in terms of labour control and affordability. In other Ethiopian industrial parks, worker accommodation continues to be factory based: for example, 3,500 workers are to be housed in new factory dormitories built by a South Korean garments manufacturer in Bole Lemi Industrial Park (Ethiopian Monitor, 2022).

Lekki Free Zone, Nigeria:

Not all factories in Nigeria’s Lekki Free Zone offer onsite accommodation, with most migrant workers living outside the zone in private rental accommodation or informal housing. However, where factory dormitories are provided by the mostly Chinese firms that have invested in the zone, they have strict regulations on exit. Occupants are not permitted to leave during the working week, instead remaining within the compounds 24 hours a day from Monday to Saturday (Goodburn, Knoerich, Mishra & Calabrese, 2024).

Liaoshen Industrial Park, Uganda:

SEZ dormitories were first built in Uganda because of Covid-19 restrictions, which prevented workers from travelling to and from work (Goodburn, Knoerich, Mishra & Calabrese, 2024). These have now become more common and several Chinese firms in Liaoshen Industrial Park, near Kapeeka, operate onsite dormitories. Occupants are not permitted to leave during the working week, even when ill unless certified by a doctor. Living conditions in the dormitories in Uganda are poor, with crowded quarters, unsanitary conditions (particular for women) and highly-polluting indoor solid fuel stoves for cooking (Goodburn, Knoerich, Mishra & Calabrese, 2024).

Phakalane Industrial Cluster, Botswana:

Factory housing has been absent in the case of Botswana’s Phakalane Industrial Cluster, hence most migrants have found private rental accommodation. The incoming population has settled in rural areas on the periphery of the capital city Gaborone, leading to the creation of ‘commuter’ or ‘satellite’ towns with a lower cost of living and rental spaces. This has resulted in traditionally agricultural rural settlements assuming urban characteristics, such as commercialisation of land for rental markets (Sebego & Gwebu, 2013).

Sri City, India:

Migrant women workers in Sri City SEZ in south India are housed in privately-run hostels outside the SEZ boundaries, subcontracted by firms to private operators rather than run directly by employers. Women are collected by bus before each shift, transported to the factories and then returned after completion of their shift. Rental fees are deducted from their wages at source. Hostel rooms accommodate between 5 and 10 women sleeping on floor mats, with food provided in the hostel too. Entry and exit conditions are highly restrictive: women are not allowed to leave without permission from their employer and a permit, except for one weekly supervised group excursion to buy necessities.

Such strict conditions were imposed by firms and monitored by hostel managers, in part because of safety concerns for the young women, as well as to maintain a dependable workforce (Crane et al, 2022). Rural Indian families would not allow daughters to migrate for work unless their safety could be assured; therefore, controlling women’s movements and confining them to hostels allowed firms an adequate supply of young, female labour that would otherwise be unavailable (see also Goodburn & Knoerich, 2022; Goodburn & Mishra, 2024).

Noida Special Economic Zone, India:

Migrants who come to work in Noida in India’s National Capital Region typically find accommodation on their own in nearby urban villages, where leasing rooms to migrants has provided a highly profitable source of income to the local population (Das & Kumar, 2022). Although there is no factory-provided housing in or near the Noida SEZ, some of the industries in the larger Noida industrial area offer dormitories or other types of managed accommodation. Here, the labour contractor who hires groups of migrant workers typically also helps them find accommodation. Contractors may own their own blocks of rooms where they house workers, acting as their landlord, or may find rooms in rental units owned by others, acting as a manager for the landlord (Mishra, forthcoming).

The case of China:

In China’s SEZs from the 1980s onwards, a “dormitory labour regime” emerged in which rural migrant workers employed in labour-intensive manufacturing were housed in dormitories within the factory site. Dormitories were provided on a short-term basis, with workers – mostly women – housed in single-sex multi-storey buildings, sleeping in bunk beds with eight to 20 per room, with communal bathrooms. They were thus available 24 hours a day for “just-in-time” production schedules and to work excessive overtime. They were also subject to intense regulation of their non-working time (Smith & Pun, 2006; Pun, 2007). By controlling when workers could enter or leave dormitories, and by providing not only accommodation but also all food, and sometimes transport and leisure activities, firms could control almost every aspect of the workers’ daily lives (Goodburn & Mishra, 2024).

In some firms in the 1990s, women were forbidden from leaving dormitories other than to work, except for during set hours on Sunday, whereas male workers were permitted to come and go more freely (Hsing, 1998). By the late 1990s, however, most dormitory regulations were more relaxed, and in their limited leisure time workers were relatively free to move around and experience the city, where some of them eventually chose to settle. Positive impacts of this were noted for migrant women in particular (Gaetano, 2008)

After the mid-2000s, with less strict state management of rural-urban migration and increasing urban settlement, many migrant couples chose private rental accommodation rather than dormitories, although most remained excluded from the possibility of formally transferring their household registration (hukou) to the city (Siu, 2015). These private rentals had long sprung up in and around SEZs and other areas which experienced a rapid influx of in-migrants, providing an affordable accommodation option for those who did not live in factory dormitories, in particular the large number of migrants who found employment in the service sector catering to the newly industrialising and urbanising area.

Rental accommodation also provided a welcome source of income for locals, especially in newly “urban villages”, where many former farmers turned to rentiership, constructing informal buildings to let to incoming migrant workers from across China. Municipal governments’ restrictions on housing development were routinely violated, as villagers first added new storeys to existing buildings themselves, then employed migrant construction teams to erect new residential blocks (Wang, Wang & Wu, 2009). Low-quality, high-density housing came to dominate many urban villages in Shenzhen and other rapidly industrialising cities. Many of these buildings were owned by families, but some were collective, particularly those built on “compensation” or “rural development” land (small plots left to villages for economic activities when agricultural land was expropriated) (Tong et al, 2021). By the 2000s, many of China’s villagers-turned-landlords had made their fortunes and moved elsewhere, leaving migrant renters as the main population in most “urban villages”. These became lively and thriving commercial and residential districts, but challenges arose in the course of later urban upgrading and “gentrification”: since “urban villages” were overwhelmingly populated by migrant renters, no compensation for demolition and redevelopment was paid to the inhabitants, and instead payments were made to absentee landlords, leaving many residents homeless and uncompensated (Wang, 2021).

China-associated zones overseas

Chinese firms manufacturing overseas, including in China’s overseas SEZs, have often shown a preference for onsite accommodation of migrant workers in dormitories, even where this is not the local norm, because of its advantages in terms of reliability of labour (Goodburn, Knoerich, Mishra & Calabrese, 2024). These dormitories tend to impose at least some restrictions on worker mobility. They also often enhance labour control by making workers available onsite to work at any point during day or night, and restrict their opportunities to engage in labour organisation (Goodburn & Mishra, 2024). In some cases, while offering migrant women a relatively safe living environment, dormitories can also reinforce existing gender relations, with female workers subject to stringent restrictions on movement and association, and/or expected to cook and clean for male workers (Goodburn, forthcoming).