This paper focuses on the planning of ‘infitah’ (open-door) in the mid-1970s Egypt. Utilizing planning archives, oral histories, state reports, 5-year national plans, and field-research, this paper shows 'how' infitah was planned in relation to emerging geographies of oil in the Middle East and institutionalized and planned through a process of ‘scaling’ Egyptian agrarian life to respond to new demands for labor in the Gulf and new investments by Gulf capital in the Egyptian Nile valley. In the meantime, new geographies of work emerged in which the cheapened work of human subjects and non-human species were appropriated through various policies and development schemes that deemed them uncapitalized and unproductive and thus needed to be properly incorporated in capitalist development. Focusing on specific categories of work (broadly defined as paid and unpaid labor of human subjects and nonhuman species), this chapter shows how the work of tarahil (seasonal migratory) workers, women in the countryside, and livestock were planned and transformed during the 1980s and 1990s in Egypt. Situated in the ‘underdeveloped’ Egyptian south’s sugarcane regions, this paper critically investigates the role of unpaid and cheapened labor by humans and nonhumans in the planning of neoliberal policies. Through historical-geographical research and a critical engagement with social reproduction theory, this chapter offers a historicized reading of the geographies of neo-liberalization. Using oral archives and public records, the first section follows the ideologies and conceptualizations that guided the planners of the Infitah who established careers as planning experts in the Middle East and across the global south during the previous decades. The second section looks at the policies and institutional arrangements that restructured work and land- and the agrarian “reserve army’ - in relation to emerging relations with the fast-urbanizing Gulf. Central to these changes in the new agrarian land reforms in 1991 that aimed to reverse the revolutionary land reforms in the 1950s. My research shows how these reforms were deemed necessary by the Egyptian planners, the World Bank, and the USAID as the only solution for increasing labor demands in the aftermath of the migrations to the Gulf since the mid-1970s. Finally, the third section will delve into three categories of ‘work’ – seasonal migratory workers (tarah’il), women in the countryside, and domestic livestock in family farms. Together, these three examples draw a picture of how work was planned in the early years of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ turn in Egypt

Tanta llKettan is a prominent Egyptian public sector company with ten factories across 74 feddans, specializing in oils, paints, and wood products. Established in 1954 during Egypt's post-colonial era, it was part of the Nasserite' socialist' experiment (1954-1970). In the early 2000s, discussions regarding privatization began, culminating in its privatization in 2003 as part of the Economic Reform and Structural Readjustment Program (ERSAP), driven by the state, IMF, and World Bank. This privatization was promoted as a path to economic development, with public sector mismanagement blamed for its financial losses and inefficiencies. Timothy Mitchell's concept of the novel 'dreamland' decade characterized the 1990s when Egypt embraced neoliberalism. The overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 sparked hope for change, leading Tanta llKettan workers to challenge the privatization in the Egyptian Council of State court. In September 2011, the court ruled to revoke the privatization due to corrupt deals. This paper rethinks the state as a coherent body, tracing the different faces of the state and how they unfold to Tanta llKettan's workers. I examine different ethnographic scenes to follow the state's absences, presences, and fragmentations that were manifested within specific moments of the labor movement. Tracing state incoherence, workers experience state experimentation as it emerges in theatrical and performative modalities. I analyze the juxtaposition of instances where securitization is heightened and others where the state acts out the role of the heroic workers' rights defendant, temporarily rupturing state-capital wedlock. I argue that these temporal ruptures were not moments exemplary of severance in the normalized capital logic of operations within state institutions. Yet, the performance itself is important in understanding the state's various strategies to disperse workers’ factory occupation. How this rupture halts the labor movement is not only limited to securitization or policing but also includes creating rifts between workers, invoking fear through suspensions and terminations, and finally, offering (forcing) financial packages. The study is based on a year-long ethnography, conducted from May 2018 to May 2019, with Tanta llKettan laborers involved in the resistance movement and anti-privatization case.

Since the Tunisian Revolution, political leaders, economists, the press and the general public have tended to take a negative view of Tunisia’s informal sector, estimated to account for more than a third of national GDP and about half of the workforce. The dominant view is that if those in the informal sector paid their taxes and customs duties Tunisia could meet its budget needs with minimal or no borrowing. A policy recommendation popularized by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto is formalization—integrating the informal sector into the formal economy through incentives and sanctions. Based on annual one-month research visits, in-depth case studies of informal workers, interviews with scholars, policymakers, union officials, and several institutional studies of taxation, this paper argues that the informal sector is not the major culprit. The Tunisia Inclusive Labor Initiative (TILI) study in 2014 demonstrated that nearly 90% of informal workers earn less than 5,000 dinars per year and therefore owe no tax. Regarding customs, smuggling needs to be controlled--especially tobacco, alcohol, drugs and arms—but some contraband products, such as gasoline, actually help the Tunisian economy. Studies by the Ministry of Finance suggest that most lost revenue is due to tax evasion by workers in the formal sector—especially those in the liberal professions such as doctors, lawyers, architects and teachers. Formalization is a partial solution, but possible for only a minority of informal workers. Many Tunisians view the state as corrupt and wasteful—a view substantiated by successive governments which have inflated the bureaucracy, tripled the public sector wage bill, and done little to address the problems that led to the Revolution, such as persistent regional inequality. Many complain that the public services for which they are taxed—schools, health, social security and infrastructure--have greatly eroded. We conclude that there are no easy solutions to Tunisia’s economic problems. Because of massive borrowing, the Tunisian debt now nearly equals the annual GNP, with debt service taking up an increasing share of the national budget. However, a good starting point is to end scapegoating the informal sector and to adopt a coherent development policy that includes robust tax reform, restricting the flat-tax system under which 400,000 individuals and businesses pay only token taxes, and especially collecting taxes from tax evaders in the formal sector.