The Oil industry and its derivative sectors have been the largest productive sectors of the Iranian economy from the turn of the 20th century. Oil workers have played a formative role in shaping the contemporary Iranian modernity, from the formation of the modern nation state to the particular manners in which the national economy, social geography, and public culture have been institutionalized. Those working in the sprawling petroleum sector - technical staff, providers of services, and laborers- have constituted the largest segment of the industrial workforce and, throughout Iran's turbulent recent history, have been among the main agents of change during the defining moments of political crises and transition. Yet, in recent decades, and especially after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, a discursive trend has emerged in the public spheres of academia, mass media, and policy-making circles that not only negates the continued pivotal significance of laboring producers in this vital industry, but also actively undermines and works toward fragmenting and dismantling labor’s attempts at collective bargaining at the workplace, and to have a voice in pressing social, environmental, legal, and political-economic issues related to the sector. This paper will analyze the changing politics of labor relations in the Iranian oil industry since the 197 revolution. More specifically, I will analyze four inter-related domains that have worked toward fragmenting the labor process: First, the structural industrial re-organization of production and refining that includes the privatization of upstream and midstream operations. Second, the legislative changes to labor laws intended to reduce job security by casualizing work contracts. Third, the spatial transformation of the urban built environment of whereby historical company towns such as Abadan have been increasingly undermined and marginalized by the fallout from military conflicts, under-investment, and massive demographic change, and replaced by highly policed and controlled new company towns with more shallow and vulnerable social networks of solidarity. Last, a relentless neoliberal discursive framing of the industry as an economic and technical sector where the pivotal role of working producers is either dismissed, or is rendered systematically invisible. This paper is part of a book project of the social history of labor in the oil industry, and is based on extensive ethnographic and archival research.

We explore cases of women landholders who are also farm managers in Egypt’s New Lands (areas cultivated after the building of the high Aswan Dam) who, in order to gain power and control over resource use and access, behave as men by looking and talking in less feminine ways, acting serious and confident, and carrying out what is perceived locally as ‘dangerous’ muscular and technological activities. By such performance of masculinity, these women are accepted into male roles and subsequently effectively and assertively participate in public life, as well as access adequate irrigation water, additional property, and financial credit. We take a relational approach to understand these women’s success in adopting these tasks. We argue that these women adopt these masculine tasks successfully by also behaving as women, particularly by accentuating their propriety and submissiveness to male authority (by calling strange men brothers and sons, dressing modestly, refraining from joking, and describing themselves as ‘chicken’ in front of their husbands). They do so to gain acceptance, permission, and validation for adopting these roles by managing their husbands’ pride, maintaining male authority more broadly in the community and meeting the social expectation of propriety, which is threatened when performing these masculine tasks (irrigating at night, increased mobility, and interacting with non-related men). Men, depending on their relationships with these women, respond in different ways to these women’s infringement on domains of power and control by acknowledging their involvement as men colleagues or by undermining this involvement as being linked to the New Lands context, for example, claiming that there are less weeds and light soils in the New Lands or that there are certain new technologies which make muscular and dangerous tasks women-friendly. These findings emphasize women's agency (through strategic performance of femininity and masculinity) and confirm that gender roles change and thus not natural or fixed. It is important that women are acknowledged in performing masculine roles as these roles tend to be more valued (in terms of remuneration for example). One, however, should not lose sight of also revalorizing tasks which are labeled as ‘feminine tasks’.

In the late 1990s, as the Mubarak regime accelerated the implementation of market reforms the number of labor protests grew significantly. The wave of protests continued in the 2000s, reaching 3.9 a day in 2008, 4.4 in 2009, and 5.8 in 2010. It is not surprising that as the Egyptian Revolution erupted that the number of labor protests would rise significantly. It is also not surprising that as the contestation over the direction of the country continued after Mubarak’s overthrow and during Morsi’s tenure in office that the number of labor protests remained high, averaging 38.6 protests per day. What is more surprising is that labor protests continued at a high rate after his overthrow by General Sisi and Sisi subsequent election to the presidency. Since Sisi’s coming to power, repression in Egypt has risen to levels that are significantly higher than anything experienced during Mubarak’s tenure while at the same time government renewed to implement neoliberal economic policies intensified. The number of labor protests has declined when compared to Morsi’s time in office. However, they remain significantly higher, at more than 29 per day between mid-2014 and the end of 2015, than they were during the last years of the Mubarak regime when repression when repression of opposition political parties’ and civil society activists was not as intense as it has become during Sisi’s tenure. This paper will rely on Global Database, Language and Tone (GDELT) and Land Center for Human Rights in Cairo among others to document the patterns of labor protest since the late 1990s. It will content that the continued high levels of labor protests in Egypt despite the increasing costs of mounting such protests can be explained by drawing on the insights of prospect theory which argues that people respond to and act differently depending on whether they perceive themselves to be in the domain of losses or the domain of gains. When in the domain of gains, people tend to act to protect what they have and thus are more risk averse. However, when they perceive themselves to be in the domain of loss, their assessment of risk shifts and they are more willing to engage in potentially costly action. In other words, paradoxically, the heightened repression under Sisi is pushing more workers into the domain of loss and thus is making them more not less willing to engage in protests.