The Middle East is marked by persistently high un- and underemployment, particularly amongst its youth and its university graduates. Notably, unemployment and working poverty as central factors behind the so-called Arab Spring have become even more pronounced in the post-Arab Spring era. In Jordan, much scholarly and practitioners’ attention is being paid to the challenging integration of Syrian refugees, also in its labor market, but little has been said about how measures against Jordan’s raging youth unemployment have adapted to recent trends. The proposed paper looks at Jordan’s policy measures against youth and graduate unemployment over the last decade (2008-2018). It asks not only how effective these measures have been but, especially, which logics have led to their inception, arguing that they were subject to political, not only economic, considerations. To what extent have, back in 2010, Arab Spring protests shifted the balance toward measures that tackle not only unemployment but are also meant to boost the Jordan monarchy’s legitimacy? How has the arrival of Syrian refugees, and with it the arrival of international relief agencies’ humanitarian aid, impacted local labor market policies? While giving in to these political constraints, to what degree could measure still take into account Jordan’s specific labor market challenges of public-private market segregation, brain drain and job creation statistically eaten up by migrant labor? Methodologically, the paper looks at 4-5 policy measures, identifying their main short-term and long-term goals (creating permanent vs. precarious employment) and public perceptions of their successes and shortcomings. Based on primary and secondary sources (with empirical data gathered through semi-structured interviews with policy makers, NGO and aid agency workers as well as persons affected by the labor policies in question), the research also looks for any evidence of roads not taken, i.e., measures that were never implemented or severely rewritten, in order to arrive at a new understanding of Jordan’s labor market.