Contenu du sommaire : Mondes du travail : mutations et résistances

Eight years after the outbreak of revolution in the winter of 2010-2011, the social question remains central to Tunisian protest scenes. Whereas mobilizations for public employment have greatly gained in visibility after 2011, the private industrial sector has witnessed a less documented wealth of workers' movements. Over and above material demands, these mobilizations raise moral questions, linked to the rupture of protective social pacts. Based on the study of the mobilization of workers in the “Technoverre” glass factory, this article shows the ways in which the new owner of the factory, by breaking promises of a new start and endangering the professional identity of glass workers, has contributed to nourishing a struggle which defends all at once the company, jobs and the “profession.”

This article deals with working conditions in the particular economic sector of textile/clothing produced for export to the United States, which has developed in Jordan's Qualified Industrial Zones. Based on fieldwork carried out in 2018, it focuses more specifically on working conditions of migrant labor, which is preponderant in this sector, as well as forms of contestation of those conditions. Reflection is thus engaged regarding a form of “extraterritorial” work and the resulting emergence of an idealized figure of the worker.

Numerous commonplace notions regarding labor exploitation in Italy, some of them misleading, continue to prevail in the literature, undermining the capacity to understand properly the problem and act on its true causes. This study presents a particularly instructive case : that of the Sikh community of Punjabi Indians working in the Agro Pontino in the Italian region of Latium. While it finds exploitative conditions prevailing at a systemic level although concealed behind legalistic appearances, it shows clearly that even vulnerable people have the power to resist exploitation and move actively to claim their rights.

Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria in 2011, Lebanon has welcomed more than one million Syrian refugees fleeing the violence of repression and war. This has led to the development of a vast humanitarian field dedicated to refugees, involving international and local actors. Syrian refugees have contributed to this process, by founding their own humanitarian organizations, thereby implementing a form of self-organization of aid, by refugees for refugees. A novel demand for commitment and work has emerged therefrom, enabling refugees to engage in a humanitarian career. Nonetheless, despite the financial and symbolic rewards that humanitarian work provides for refugees, it does not enable them to lift themselves out of the precariousness of their condition.

For the past few years, Italy has been privy to a proliferation of “voluntary” programs reserved for asylum seekers. The emergence of this new type of voluntary work helps to explain the way free labor is produced, justified and attributed to a population which is, socially, economically and legally, particularly vulnerable. Whereas voluntary programs are explained by those who organize them as an “anti-racist” practice, the empirical analysis of cases of voluntary work, as well as the subjective relationships it produces, place these programs within a realm characterized by power relations, disciplinary codes and forms of resistance.

In this paper, I address the way shipbuilding workers attempt to cope with the conditions of their existence and of employment precariousness in the Perama zone, a suburb of western Piraeus. Added emphasis is placed on how workers conceive their involvement in local labor processes and remote power structures in a framework of serious economic recession. The ethnographic data shows that workers create socially meaningful relationships and construct webs of significance through employment in the context of a cruel labor market. Shipbuilding workers, by being part of wider socio-economic activities and relations, devise survival strategies and a particular heuristic logic through which a series of facts and processes gain meaning, which in turn helps them cope with the violence of extreme acute crisis. Hence, I look at workers' views and positions at various levels, including those relating to motives, strategies, representations and prestige as well as values.

Morocco has, since 2011, been witnessing the development of “new” forms of organizing and mobilizing employees around labor-related demands outside unions and legal frameworks. These contentious dynamics are unfolding particularly in the public education sector, which suffers from neoliberal policies and austerity measures. Focusing on the recent movement of teachers hired on a contractual basis, we highlight the emergence of these dynamics as well as their functioning, casting light on their relations with the unions.

This text traces the evolution of autonomous unions in Algeria, from corporatist demands towards questions of democratic change in the context of the Arab spring. It shows how union struggles found it difficult to invest the space of contestation during the black decade of the 1990s, only to proliferate after 2000, and constitute a routine part of protest action. Two unions are exceptions to this rule : the CNES (Conseil National des Enseignants du Supérieur) and the SNAPAP (Syndicat National Autonome des Personnels de l'Administration Publique). These were early models for resistance in the space of contestation prior to the generalization of social protest in 2010-2011.

In the fall of 2019, Lebanon experienced an unprecedented protest movement which called into question the political system and its representatives. We solicited the reactions of Ahmad Dirani and Ghassan Slaybi, Lebanese sociologists and longtime union activists, and asked them for their perspective on the popular movement and its implications for work and related recent conflicts. The intent was to question and debate the past, present and future of the Lebanese labor movement.

This article analyses the effects of states of emergency on industrial relations and labor and union mobilizations. Based on the example of the two years of emergency rule in Turkey (July 21, 2016 to July 17, 2018), it shows how the state of emergency transforms relations between employers, the state and workers. This transformation is not temporary, has consequences for the mobilizing potential of the unions beyond the state of emergency and does not present a rupture with the previous period. Restrictions on trade union rights are not, however, unlimited. At the company level, workers find local, European or international relays to organize demonstrations or strikes.

In May 2008, Lebanese citizens voted for a new parliament based on a hybrid electoral law combining both majoritarian and proportional systems. Irrespective of the results and the winners and losers, these elections marked the inaugration of a new phase in the Lebanese system following a phase of polarization between the March 8 and March 14 camps. While the elections set the ruling class up against contestation groups, it led to the victory of the former. This victory not only reflects the hollowing-out of Lebanese political life but also the ability of the ruling class to control public discourse and power structures.