Troubling the Political: Women in the Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement

Abstract

The Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement (DWLM) played a central role in the Jordanian Popular Movement (al-Hirak al-Sha bi al-Urduni), commonly referred to as Hirak, from 2011 to the end of 2012. The large number of women who were active and took on leading roles in the DWLM contrasts with the absence of women's rights organizations in the Hirak. I argue that the DWLM was able to attract so many women because it developed a discourse and flexible structure that understood women to be embedded within communities and prioritized their economic needs. By studying this discourse and structure, it is possible to learn important lessons about genderinclusive political and institutional reform.In late 2010, I attended a workshop at the Royal Cultural Center in Amman on women's civil and political rights in Jordan. The audience of about fifty people included the most prominent women's rights activists in Jordan, most of whom were from middle-and upper middle-class backgrounds and lived in West Amman. At the end of the questionand-answer session, a man with a heavy rural accent, who looked as if he did not fit in, stood up to make an intervention. At the time I could not identify him, but I later learned that he was Muhammad Snayd, the spokesperson and leader of the DayWaged Labor Movement (DWLM, or Hirak Ummal al-Muyawama). Snayd asked the esteemed women of the audience why they had not joined a recent sleep-in organized by the DWLM in front of the Royal Court, which attracted over twenty female day-waged workers. The women and men of the DWLM had been protesting their low salaries and the fact that labor laws did not apply to them (see below). "Where were you?" Snayd asked. He wondered out loud why the audience before him, supposedly made up of women's rights activists, had not come out to support these women, who had mustered the courage to leave their families overnight despite being from so-called tribal, and thus arguably conservative, backgrounds. "These are women from the governorates. 1 Where were you? Why didn't you support them?" he asked.I could not get Snayd's intervention out of my mind. How was it possible for women from the governorates, or any Jordanian women for that matter, to spend a night away from home with male colleagues? Did their families consent? I wanted to find out more about these women, who had arguably participated in one of the most culturally radical Sara Ababneh is an Assistant Professor and Researcher at

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

“…In Jordan, a resurgence of labor activism featured organizing efforts by day-wage laborers and teachers, despite a recent crackdown on the latter (Adely 2012; Lacouture 2022). Writing on Egypt and Jordan, respectively, Matta (2021) and Ababneh (2016) underscored the role of women in these movements. These studies contribute to scholarship on state corporatism (Collier 1999; Burgess 2004) by examining mechanisms through which corporatist coalitions can give way to civil society activism (Kalb 2019) and the conditions under which workers exit state-corporatist arrangements rather than work within those structures.…”

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“…For example, Ababneh (2016) examines how daily wage workers in Jordan were inspired by the Arab Spring to organize and mobilize for better wages and working conditions despite the lack of support from the formal professional women's rights CSOs in Jordan.…”

“…These findings support Chant and Sweetman's (2012) suggestion that it is an oversimplification to "assume a much smoother and easier transition between individual "economic empowerment" and engaging with the social and political structures which constrain individuals" (523). Similarly, Ababneh (2016) argues that economic issues are too often considered separate from political issues. By depoliticizing poverty, we obfuscate the "political nature of neoliberal economic policies" (89).…”

Paying “Lip Service” to Gender Equality: The Hollow Implementation of Gender Mainstreaming in Jordan

“…Their efforts are largely based on social welfare and education, and are operationalized through top-down approaches that do little to foster voluntarism, participatory decision-making, or grassroots mobilization, all of which are important for collective action (Jad 2003). For example, Ababneh (2016) examines how daily wage workers in Jordan were inspired by the Arab Spring to organize and mobilize for better wages and working conditions despite the lack of support from the formal professional women's rights CSOs in Jordan. Ababneh uses this example to argue that mass political mobilization around gender issues in Jordan will probably not happen within the constraints of the institutionalized CSO sector.…”