This paper argues that the uneven breakdown of hegemony in Jordan was the terrain upon which social resistance—first from within the public sector—emerged in the mid-2000s. To demonstrate this, I draw on Gramscian concepts to trace the development of successive, often inchoate, historic blocs in Jordan leading to the breakdown, or “contraction” (Chalcraft 2016), of hegemony in the wake of King Abdullah II’s (r. 1999- ) accelerated neoliberal project. Gramsci’s formulation of hegemony as the generalization of ruling-class interests to other classes in society provides the central theoretical lens of the study (Salem 2020). However, because Gramscian hegemony is never complete and must always be understood in relation to the historical conjuncture in which it emerges (Hall 2016), I argue that hegemonic contestation should be understood as taking place within and across multiple dimensions: economic/material, institutional/corporate, and ideological/discursive. Three major implications emerge from the analysis. First, the late and incomplete incorporation of labor into Jordan’s strongest, fleeting, and perhaps only hegemonic bloc in the 1970s left workers only tenuously loyal to the state. Second, hegemonic breakdown in Jordan occurred unevenly, affecting some workers in the public sector more than others. Finally, prior, if incomplete, hegemonic incorporation empowered certain public sector workers to draw attention to the contradictions between historical state obligations and discourse, the promises of the neoliberal state, and the daily realities of working-class Jordanians. Drawing on interview evidence, archival and secondary sources, I argue that these spatio-temporal dimensions of hegemonic breakdown account for the timing, composition, and discursive strategies of workers’ struggles in Jordan—leading up to the 2011 uprisings. Finally, I argue that the study of protest dynamics in the case of Jordan advances the use of Gramsican concepts in contentious politics (beyond the well-studied case of Nasser’s Egypt) by demonstrating the importance of taking into consideration the unevenness of hegemonic articulation and contraction across and within its different dimensions.