Tunisia’s labor union UGTT was praised for its important political role in the country’s transformation process. At times it built up pressure against parts of the political elite, at other times it offered ways for consensus and cooperation between different factions. Yet, its social role since 2011 has not received as much attention. In this paper I show that a closer analysis reveals different roles that touch upon questions of social justice and stability, and thus on the overall transformation process. First, the UGTT helped by expressing socioeconomic demands in form of public protests, not only of workers but also in cooperation with other forms of civic activism. Second, it helped by mediating between protests outside its framework and state representatives, by channeling the demands into the political system or facilitating negotiations. Third, in many cases its action aimed at stopping and preventing informal protests when they were perceived as harmful to worker interests and to public order. The analysis builds on field research conducted in 2014 and 2015 and highlights challenges for the labor union, both as the representation of the formal labor sector, and as being couched between the broad informal, increasingly contentious sectors of society and the political system.

How do trade unions respond to mass uprisings against authoritarian rule? The unprecedented mass uprisings that have swept the Arab world since 2010, and unseated long-standing autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia, have surprised experts and non-experts alike. Given that workers, sometimes individually and other times as an organized force, were central actors in these uprisings, understanding their role in these transformations is crucial to understanding how revolutionary uprisings emerge. This paper seeks to explain why Egyptian and Tunisian unions have played significantly different roles in the 2010/2011 uprisings and their aftermath. While the Egyptian Trade Union Federation advised workers not to participate in the 2011 uprising, local branches of the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) were central in organizing protests against former President Ben Ali and The UGTT has played mediating political role in the ensuing transition from authoritarian rule in Tunisia. A large body of research in political science, focused largely on Latin America and Europe, has sought to bring back the role of workers and trade unions, in explaining transitions from authoritarian rule. In explaining the role of unions in these transitions, scholars have pointed to two primary factors: (1) material interests; and (2) unions’ relationship with the state under authoritarian rule. A sole focus on these factors is problematic for two reasons. First, the Egyptian and Tunisian cases challenge the assumption that unions are necessarily motivated by material interests. Instead, unions in these cases were either stripped of their ability to defend their members’ material interests (Egypt) or have emerged as entities whose agenda sometimes transcends the interests of union members (Tunisia). Second, the focus on the relationship between unions and the state under authoritarian rule obscures the interaction between unions and specific organs of the state, especially ruling political parties. This paper explores an alternative explanation to those presented in the existing scholarship. I hypothesize that the context in which trade unions emerge and whether their formation precedes the establishment of ruling or loyalist parties has important long-term implications for the type of union activism in a given country. In cases where trade unions precede the formation of ruling political parties, trade unions are more likely to develop agendas independent of the ruling party. This hypothesis highlights an under-explored factor in studies of unions in authoritarian regimes, namely unions’ ties to ruling parties. The paper employs a comparative historical approach and utilizes primary sources and interviews.

Though it was not at the forefront of the pro-democracy movement, the Egyptian labor played a decisive role in bringing down the Mubarak regime in 2011. Obviously, the Egyptian Labor movement influenced the political scene before and during the uprising. On the other hand, the 2011 uprising itself or the new political context that emerged presented a "Political Opportunity" (Tarrow 1998) for new trade unions that capitalized on it and emerged therefore at lightning speed. Therefore, for the first time, debates emerged about the role of trade unions and their right to be formed and legalized. Moreover, labor leaders advanced the idea of the minimum wage which become quickly part of the political and economical debates. Nevertheless, the Egyptian labor/trade union movement appeared in the aftermath of the uprising, and contrary to its counterpart in Tunisia, as being unable to influence the political process in a way that reflects either its organizational or socio-economic interests. On one hand, it was not able to exert enough pressure on the regime to issue a law guaranteeing syndical freedoms. On the other hand, it was not capable (or not even willing) to push for the establishment of a genuine political debate about the economic system or reforms of the existing economic order that have to take place. Adopting the assumption that the reaction of the labor to the overall political change, and the latter’s effects on it are intimately connected to the degree that the first cannot be fully understood without analyzing the latter, we propose in this paper to shed light on, at least, three explanatory variables for the labor movement actions and outcomes in the course of the transformation Process that Egypt has passed through: (1) the Post colonial State-labor relation reflected by the Moral economy and the constraints it is putting on the later choices and modalities of actions, (2) the structural reasons which are constraining the labor movement ability to achieve its economic, organizational and political goals in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, (3) the ambiguous relationship that the labor movement is keeping with the political organizations in general and the elites that were leading change in particular; and its impact on its capacity to influence the political process.

It is widely acknowledged that socioeconomic discontent among a majority of the population in the MENA region caused and promoted collective actions of dissent, which in turn led to the uprisings in 2011 and recurrent waves of contention thereafter. Although we can find numerous case studies that include data on the structure, frequencies and actors of protests, there is little systematic comparison of protest data covering the MENA region as a whole, including a broader time frame. In order to study the conditions and the political impact of those protests in a comparative framework, this paper makes use of relevant databases (e.g. ACLED) on contentious actions and compiles first a comprehensive description of frequencies of socioeconomic protests in the MENA region since 2006. It then compares socioeconomic protests with the general development of public contention. Secondly, protests are analyzed along the Goldstein Scale, numbers of fatalities and the quantity of news dealing with a specific event. This will provide a scheme that allows us to estimate the impact of events in their specific contexts. In a third step, the paper discusses ways to avoid potential shortcomings of quantitative analysis due to typical biases that are inherent in a content analysis of news, such as a disproportionate appearance of violence and a general tendency to follow 'mainstream'-media agenda-setting. Finally, the paper discusses the general political developments in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia to correlate protests and political change, thereby making first, tentative assumptions on the larger impact of regional socioeconomic contention.