Labor
Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker
Ellis Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker: Class and Politics in Egypt, 1930-1952 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).
The critique of modernization theory that began in the late 1960s had an especially significant impact on a new generation of Western scholars who rejected the prevailing academic focus on political elites to the exclusion of other political forces. Not only were elites largely studied in isolation from the masses they dominated, but the masses themselves were not attributed any role in the political process. Today, this younger generation of scholars, working in the political economy paradigm, is beginning to publish the results of its research on the role of the masses in politics.
Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran
Asef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran: A Third World Experience of Workers’ Control (London: Zed Press, 1987.)
The participation of workers in the anti-shah struggle, the rise of factory councils in 1979 and 1980, and their battles with the new Islamic state over workers’ control and other aspects of industrial relations has sparked interest in the structure and consciousness of the Iranian laboring classes.
The particular strength of this book is the extensive fieldwork which Bayat undertook in 1980 and 1981, prior to the regime’s crackdown on the left and liberals. The material he collected includes interviews with workers and council activists, and observation of factory conditions.
Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran
Habib Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985).
Over the past few years we have witnessed a welcome development in new books on Iran. Instead of general histories, spanning centuries and big events, a number of books attempt to reconstruct smaller chunks of history but in much richer detail. Ladjevardi’s work is one valuable instance, as it takes up a much ignored and little documented slice of Iranian history — that of the labor movement. Ladjevardi makes extensive use, for perhaps the first time, of the US National Archives (in addition to other more commonly used sources, such as the British Public Records).
Owen, Migrant Workers in the Gulf
Roger Owen, Migrant Workers in the Gulf (London: Minority Rights Group, Report No. 68, 1985).
Today, as oil prices plunge, the six million foreign workers in the Gulf are feeling the crunch. Roger Owen’s new survey of Gulf migrant workers is especially welcome, for the future of Gulf societies in this new era is closely bound up with the question of these foreign workers.
The Yemenis of the San Joaquin
Musa (“Moses”) Saleh laughs now at his expectations as a new immigrant to the United States. “We were fooled,” he says, reflecting on the first morning when he prepared for his new job as an apricot picker in California. “We didn’t know what kind of work our Yemeni friends had been doing here…. I dressed up in a suit and necktie and a nice pair of shoes and walked in and everyone started laughing. Well, I saw their clothes. I didn’t have to see anything else. Regular clothes, apricot juice all over them….
The Emerging Trade Union Movement in the West Bank
The last several months have witnessed an intensive Israeli crackdown against Palestinian political activists in the Occupied Territories. Since the summer, at least 21 Palestinians have been deported, and more than 80 arrested. Although the military authorities have attributed their renewed “iron fist” approach to the series of individual and apparently spontaneous assaults on Israeli troops and settlers, they have targeted key political and trade union leaders with valid residence permits and no criminal records. They have not been charged with any specific offense.
Portraits of Syrian Workers
The Dibs Company Workers
The United Arab Industrial Company, also known as the Dibs Company after its former owners, is a large textile factory located in a rural area south of Damascus. It was founded in 1955 and nationalized in 1964. In 1980, it had 1,660 employees, nearly 200 of whom were administrative personnel. The following portraits of Dibs Company workers are drawn from interviews conducted in March 1980.
The Syrian Working Class Today
What is the position of the working class in contemporary Syrian society? I posed this question ten years ago and concluded at the time that one could only speak of a “class in formation.” [1] I was criticized then for having even raised such a question. After all, pre-capitalist relations of production in Syria have disintegrated, the artisan class has declined, there are increasing numbers of large capitalist enterprises employing an ever larger number of workers, and a class-based trade union movement emerged a half century ago. So it is tempting to conclude that the working class has in fact established itself as an actor on the Syrian social scene. But its obvious weakness in contemporary politics and society continues to raise a number of questions.
Labor Movements in Bahrain
Labor activism has been a major feature of political life in Bahrain, going back to early industrial activities following the discovery of oil in 1928-1932. [1] These early efforts absorbed many destitute pearl divers, peasants and freed slaves, and paved the way for a new stratum of middlemen from among the pearl merchant families. The new economic activities gave additional impetus to British efforts to build the skeleton of a local government administration capable of coping with the social and economic transformation of the island. [2]
Migrant Labor and the Politics of Development in Bahrain
Bahrain was, after Iran and Iraq, the first country in the Gulf to have its petroleum resources developed by Western companies. It has a longer history of economic and infrastructural development than any other state in the peninsula. Bahrain’s petroleum reserves and producing capacity are also the smallest of the Gulf oil producing states. Thus, Bahrain’s rulers were the first in the Gulf to confront the problem of building a diversified modern economy. Furthermore, while political legitimacy is problematical throughout the Gulf, it is especially so in Bahrain.
Molyneux, State Policies and the Position of Women Workers in the PDRY
Maxine Molyneux, State Policies and the Position of Women Workers in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, 1966-1977 (Geneva: International Labor Office, 1982).
Trade Unions and Moroccan Politics
Morocco is unusual in the Middle East for its extensive civil society — social institutions which are relatively independent of control by the state apparatus. A complex relationship exists between the absolute and repressive monarchy of King Hassan II on the one hand and the powerful opposition institutions on the other. Among these institutions are the press and the political parties, but over the years the most impressive and most notable have been Morocco’s trade unions.
Women and Labor Migration
Women are now the heads of between 25 and 35 percent of all households in developing countries. [1] In the Middle East and North Africa, women head about 16 percent of all households. [2] One main reason for the increasing number of households headed by women is male migration to seek work outside their own countries, unaccompanied by their wives and children. When male villagers from Egypt emigrate, they do so without their families. [3] For one thing, a large number emigrate illegally, with neither official work contracts nor legal residence in countries of employment. It is much easier for them to move alone and leave their families behind.
Yemeni Workers Abroad
In Yemen one often hears the hypothesis that as men migrate abroad in search of work, women move into male economic and political roles, at least within the household. The assumption is that women take over production tasks and decisionmaking which have always been the responsibility of men. While this may well be happening in some communities in Yemen, the evidence in one village of Ta‘izz province, in the southern part of the country, suggests that the domestic effects of migration might not be simply to “fill the vacuum” created by the absence of men. [1]
Egyptian Migration and Peasant Wives
In the 1960s, Egypt supplied the labor markets of the Middle East with professionals and administrators seconded by the government. Carefully regulated and controlled, the export of labor was consistent both with Egypt’s policies in the area and with its own manpower needs. In the 1970s, government-seconded labor was overtaken in volume by a huge and largely unregulated flow of labor at all skill levels. By 1975, Egypt had overtaken Yemen as the major exporter of labor in the area, and its share of the total Arab migrant labor market had reached one third. By 1980, Egypt had at least doubled its migrant stock, an estimated 10 percent of which are women.
Algerian Migration Today
Richard Lawless and Allan and Anne Findlay, Return Migration to the Maghreb: People and Policies, Arab Papers 10 (London: Arab Research Centre, 1982).
Philippe Adair, “Retrospective de la Reforme Agraire en Algerie,” Revue Tiers-Monde 14 (1983).
Jean Bisson, “L’industrie, la ville, la palmeraie au desert,” Maghreb-Machrek 99 (1983).
Egyptian Labor Abroad
Hardly more than a decade has passed since Egypt’s pioneering emigrants first offered their skills to the nascent development of neighboring Arab countries. Measured against the volume and impact of its labor contributions, this seems a short time indeed. In that time, the limited opportunities once available only to Egypt’s most educated elite have mushroomed to require the talents and energies of tens of thousands of urban craftsmen, public employees and rural unskilled laborers. From these masses of temporary sojourners have come massive transfers of wages and remittances to Egypt’s thirsty economy.
Labor Migration in the Arab World
The Arab world comprises 18 states and was inhabited, in 1980, by more than 150 million people. [1] Two factors vital to economic development—population and oil—are, however, distributed in an extremely uneven manner among these states. The abstract possibility of mutually beneficial cooperation between the population-rich and the oil-rich is not being realized. Instead, we are seeing a process of increased inequality and deterioration in the productive and human resources of the Arab world: first, between the oil-rich and population-rich states; and second, between the Arab world as a whole and the industrialized economies from whom the real wealth of the Arab countries (mediated through oil revenues) is coming.
From the Editors (May 1984)
One of the great achievements of the capitalist class in the United States has been its ability to enlist the enthusiastic support of the trade union leadership in this country for a foreign policy of intervention and counterrevolution, a policy clearly against the interests of the organized working class here. One recent instance was AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland’s presence on the panel headed by Henry Kissinger which endorsed the Reagan Administration’s war against Central America. The interest of US corporate leaders in a policy supporting rightwing oligarchies and juntas is directly related to the preservation of low-wage, unorganized labor havens for their “runaway” shops and factories. These in turn are used as levers to wrest concessions from workers in this country.
“Please Don’t Use My Name”
This interview was conducted by Karen Pfeifer in Ankara during November 1983.
How would you like to be identified?
I have been in prison five times since the 1980 coup, so please don’t use my name. I was an activist in the construction workers’ union, a shop steward in one of the most progressive unions in the Türk-Iş federation. I started as an unskilled worker, making pavement. I worked for two years in a private company, then for 25 years in the state highway department.
What was your work day like?
