Labor
Keeping Migrant Workers in Check
For nearly half a century, the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — have been a destination point for international labor migration, annually attracting large numbers of workers from the Middle East and Asia. The GCC states are unique because of the skewed character of their demographic profile: Expatriate workers make up more than 50 percent of the total population in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, [1] and more than 25 percent of the populations of Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
Recent Trends in Middle Eastern Migration
Although the history of Middle Eastern labor migration to North America is not as well known as that of Irish and Southern European immigrants, Yemenis were working in Detroit by the 1920s and Palestinian and Lebanese diasporas existed around the globe before the end of the nineteenth century. North Africans were migrating to France by the thousands during World War I, and by the tens of thousands after World War II. Yet it was not until the 1970s, with the advent of the Middle East oil boom, that rates of inter-Arab and Asian-Gulf migration took off. The new requirements for labor as well as the vast differences in wealth between sending and receiving countries fueled the process. Male workers from Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia headed to Libya.
The Social History of Labor in the Middle East
Ellis Jay Goldberg, ed., The Social History of Labor in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996).
The advent of structural adjustment programs since the 1980s has rekindled interest in workers and labor organizations, perhaps the greatest “losers” in recent reform processes. This edited volume includes chapters on Turkey, Egypt, Syria, the Maghreb, Israel and Iran. Its chronological range extends from the Ottoman era to the contemporary period.
Egyptian Privatization
After decades of delay, privatization in Egypt is now taking off. [1] Since 1993, 119 of 314 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been fully or partially sold. [2] These have been mainly manufacturing ventures, but the government has also pledged to offer utilities, public sector banks and insurance companies, maritime and telecommunications firms and leading tourist hotels. In May 1998, the International Monetary Fund, long skeptical of the Mubarak regime’s commitment to privatization, pronounced itself satisfied with the program’s progress. Measured in terms of annual privatization receipts as a percentage of GDP, their report noted that Egypt ranks fourth internationally, trailing only Hungary, Malaysia and the Czech Republic.
Labor and the Challenge of Economic Restructuring in Iran
During the last 20 years, the Iranian economy has had to adjust to a revolution, an eight-year war with Iraq, economic isolation and the collapse of its oil revenues. As a result, Iran witnessed the complete undoing of its gains in per capita income from the boom years of the 1970s. The generation of Iranians who grew up before the revolution, at a time of steadily increasing incomes, view the last 20 years of decline and stagnation with disbelief. For the new generation, which came of age after the revolution, the pressing issue is not past losses but the current reality of stagnation and unemployment: One in four Iranian youths cannot find jobs.
Reform or Reaction?
This issue of Middle East Report presents critical — and timely — analysis of the impact of neoliberal economic policies in the Middle East and North Africa. Authors representing a variety of disciplines and viewpoints explore the dilemmas confronting progressive forces searching for alternative programs to restore growth and promote equity.
Room to Breathe
Less than a block from the seventeenth-century walls that surround Rabat’s medina (old city) is the Association Tamaynut. Inside the three-room office one can attend meetings, listen to lectures and participate in passionate discussions. A young man, Ibrahim, is there every weekday from morning until night. One of Morocco’s many thousand unemployed college graduates, he spends his free time doing volunteer work that he finds gratifying.
Making It on the Middle Eastern Margins of the Global Capitalist Economy
Victoria Bernal, Cultivating Workers: Peasants and Capitalism in a Sudanese Village (Columbia, 1991).
Jenny White, Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey (Texas, 1994).
Egypt’s New Labor Law Removes Worker Provisions
After prolonged negotiations, the Egyptian government has drafted a law to diminish dramatically the state’s role in labor affairs. Expected to go before Parliament this spring, it gives both private employers and public-sector managers far greater leeway to hire and fire, and to set wages and benefits for future employees. In an explicit quid pro quo for the “right to fire,” the law also legalizes strikes, which have been banned since 1952. It signifies the government’s formal withdrawal from the Nasserist “moral economy,” in which Egyptians came to expect the state to guarantee job security and a living wage in exchange for their contribution to national production.
Gaza’s Workers and the Palestinian Authority
The story of the January 1995 strike in a private health clinic in Gaza City was published in only one paper, al-Watan, a new weekly affiliated with Hamas. Neither al-Quds nor al-Nahar, dailies in tune with the Palestinian Authority (PA), reported on the first workers’ strike under Palestinian self-rule.
Palestinian Trade Unions and the Struggle for Independence
Not so long ago, to visit the Erez checkpoint on Gaza’s “border” crossing with Israel was to witness a modem slave market. Tens of thousands of Palestinian workers would wake up at 3 am and gather at Erez for the privilege of working in their occupier’s economy, predominantly in construction and agriculture, undertaking the “dirty work” that Jewish workers would not do, for a wage on average a third less than their Jewish peers. At least 30 percent of Gaza’s GNP derived from wages earned in Israel.
Book Review
Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds (California, 1992).
Edmund Burke III, ed., Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (California, 1993).
Egypt’s Factory Privatization Campaign Turns Deadly
The Egyptian government’s campaign to sell off the cream of its state-owned factories to private investors took a violent and murderous turn after some 7,000 evening-shift workers at the Kafr al-Dawwar Spinning and Weaving Factory staged a spontaneous sit-down strike on September 30, 1994. Security forces quickly sealed off the plant to prevent other shifts — the factory’s work force totals around 22,000 — from joining the strikers who were protesting recent firings and cuts in bonus and incentive pay.
Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton, 1987).
Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Sustaining Movement, Creating Space
“Up here at the encampment,” said Abu Tha’ir, peering ahead through the windshield, “we cross the Green Line into ’48. If there is a checkpoint and they stop us, they’ll send me back to prison.” He looked at me as if asking for my opinion, but he did not slow down as we approached the army post perched on the hillside overlooking the road north of Tulkarm.
Occupational Health and Safety in Turkey
Kandir Baysu has been hospitalized twice over the past eight years, both times for more than two months and requiring dozens of blood transfusions. Baysu, a worker at a battery manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Istanbul, thinks he is about due for another hospital stay. As in the past, he expects the diagnosis to be the same: lead poisoning.
Unlike hundreds of thousands of factory workers across Turkey, Baysu is relatively lucky. A lengthy series of newspaper articles and union-backed court battles in the late 1970s drew nationwide attention to health and safety conditions at Mutlu, forcing the government to take the rare move of shutting down the plant until certain changes were instituted.
From the Editors (November/December 1989)
When the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Washington in September, President Husni Mubarak was on hand to speak about the Third World debt crisis. For more than a year, Cairo has been negotiating a new $500 million agreement with the IMF that would allow Egypt to reschedule $10 billion worth of debt payments falling due before December 1990. At one stage Mubarak denounced the IMF as a “quack doctor,” but his government has had to swallow many IMF “reform” prescriptions. (Currency devaluations, for instance, have tripled the Egyptian pound value of dollar-denominated debt contracted in the early 1980s.)
