Joel Beinin
LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series | 14 | January 2016
Abstract
Workers’ movements contributed substantially to the 2011 popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Bahrain. Comparing the role of workers before, during and after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt demonstrates that the relatively successful installation of a procedural democracy in Tunisia owes a great deal to the movements of workers and the unemployed in the uprisings and to their organisational structure and political horizon. Tunisian workers could compel the Tunisian General Federation of Labor (UGTT), despite the wishes of its pro-Ben Ali national leadership, to join them and the rest of the Tunisian people in a struggle against autocracy. Egyptian workers, on the other hand, were not able to force the Egyptian Trade Union Federation(ETUF) to support the uprising and had no national organisations and only weak links to intellectuals.
This paper forms part of a series on Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA Region (SMPM), led by Dr John Chalcraft.
About the Author
Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of MiddleEast History at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. Beinin’s research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and political economy ofmodern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel and on US policy in the Middle East. Beinin has written or edited ten books, most recently Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2015), Social Movements,Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, co-edited with Frédéric Vairel (Stanford University Press, August 2013) and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010).