Morocco’s Arab Spring events constitute a puzzle. Most scholars agree that a popular protest movement emerged in the country during the 2011 cycle of uprisings in the region. But for many scholars, the formation of government through elections that was introduced to the structure of the Moroccan state in response to the movement is a non-transformative outcome. For some, the content of the constitutional amendments are toothless since the monarch retained vast unchecked authority. Others argue that the mobilizations were still unthreatening to trigger a militaristic suppression seen elsewhere in the region under regimes with similar patrimonial militaries, or even that the amendments are just a reflection of the monarch’s own independent will to delegate power and avoid the daily functions of government. Alternatively, I argue that this transformation is path breaking from previous policies of liberalization of the Moroccan autocracy because it represented a peculiar alignment of social forces in Morocco. Labor mobilizations over new austerity measures substantiated the threat of the ensuing democracy movement by arming it with disruptive capacities that put pressure on the alliance of the ruling elites over the question of democracy. As such, the concession that the elites offered in Morocco is multi-layered. The concession included a direct cost that elites absorbed by accepting an unprecedented increase in minimum wage levels to remove labor from street protests, and it also surrendered the premiership to electoral victors – traditional, Islamist, and radical opposition parties that all had trade union arms present in the mobilizations. Fractured trade unionism that emerged out of entrenched segmentation of the Moroccan labor market was significant enough to threaten disruption, but still easily demobilized by the elites when it is compared to the costs Tunisian workers put on their ruling elites unraveling their alliances. The Moroccan outcome is a product of these historical processes. This research builds on interviews with 46 democracy activists and trade unionists in Morocco and applies various microeconomic analyses.