Mobilizing within and beyond the Labor Union: A Case of Precarious Workers’ Collective Actions in North Africa

Abstract

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of a group of mobilized precarious workers in Tunisia’s public sector, the author asks how workers’ collective actions are shaped by and, at the same time, can act upon labor unions’ responses to them. Findings suggest that unions can enable and simultaneously constrain precarious workers’ collective actions. More important, workers learn from their interactions with the union, and this learning process can contribute to innovations in workers’ mobilizing structure and repertoire of actions. The Tunisian case contributes to the debate on the relationship between precarious workers and institutionalized actors as well as to the study of mobilized precarious workers by elucidating the ways in which the workers’ embedded and innovative agency plays out within and beyond a well-established labor union.

Introduction to a Special Issue on Labor in the Middle East and North Africa: Precarity, Inequality, and Migration

“…Articles in this issue advance this research agenda by expanding the scope of analysis in important ways. Building on previous work on the relationship between unions and precarious workers in Tunisia (King 2017), Saerom Han’s (2023) account of site workers’ activism takes seriously the complex relationship between privileged insiders, such as union members, and excluded outsiders, such as precarious workers. Preminger and Bondy’s (2023) study of Palestinian construction workers in Israel draws explicit attention to ethnonationalist settings, theorizing their effects on workers’ advocacy.…”

“…On the other hand, however, they also recognized the need to “move beyond” the union by organizing a horizontal network across Tunisia that bolstered their mobilization capacities. Han’s analysis thus urges us to develop more nuanced theoretical tools beyond the “institutionalist and binary understandings (either supportive or constraining) of the union–precarious workers’ relationship” (Han 2023: 686). Han’s study invites greater attention to the complex relationships between unions and precarious workers.…”