Al-ʿUcha

Abstract

On a warm, sunny day in the autumn of 2020, I met Hanan, a farmworker from Ouarzazate who migrated to southern Morocco’s Souss Massa in the early 2000s.1 It was around noon, a few minutes before she entered her meeting with the agricultural company’s representative and some of her fellow agricultural workers. Hanan had migrated in the hope of finding a job with the region’s leading producer and exporter of high-value crops. She had worked for twenty years in the business, first on the farms and later in the packaging station of Soprofel, a French-owned agribusiness. While Hanan had her meeting, I stood outside with dozens of other women farmworkers who had worked for decades in this packaging station. Their stories are similar to those of the many other workers affected by the globalization of agricultural production and commodity chains in combination with the increasing flexibilization of labor regimes. In this context, Soprofel has laid off hundreds of female agricultural workers without proper severance packages, in violation of Moroccan labor law.Soprofel specializes in producing and exporting agricultural products. It is located on the outskirts of Biougra, a small town in the Souss Massa region, and has farms and packaging stations throughout Morocco. Attracted by favorable climate and labor conditions, the French owners relocated their business to southern Morocco to produce and export cheap fruits and vegetables to Europe. It was supposed to stand as a salient example of Morocco’s investment-friendly climate. Soprofel is also a packaging house employing hundreds of women between their midthirties and their early sixties at wages barely above the poverty line.The women I met that day in front of Soprofel’s office, desperately waiting for the company’s representatives to put them back to work or give them their right to fair compensation, are the backbone of Morocco’s economic growth; their cheap labor is one of the country’s main advantages in the global agricultural market. The choice of hiring a predominantly female workforce is not without political significance. Within global agricultural production, women workers are thought to be docile and more exploitable. However, given the mobilizations led by these farmworkers during the time I spent with them, I noticed that this is far from the case.After two hours, Hanan left the meeting and angrily shouted to the crowd of women eager for news: “The company refused our demands. They refuse to listen to us.” As I tried to understand what happened in the negotiations, dozens of women agricultural workers improvised a sit-in in front of the Biougra commune. They chanted, “No concessions, no concessions.” During the sit-in the women decided to start an occupation to force the company to accept their demands. Word spread quickly, and the farmworkers started marching toward another subsidiary company of Soprofel, where they would set up al-ʿUcha and block its entrance until an agreement was reached. (The word al-ʿUcha, or “tent,” refers to the makeshift camp that workers set up during labor unrest, strikes, and occupations.) I followed the women to the occupation and witnessed the beginning of a female farmworkers–led mobilization that lasted for six months (fig. 1). By engaging in this occupation, the women wanted to turn their grievances and political demands into a public event, visible to all other inhabitants of Biougra and beyond. The decision to launch the blockage was not just a spontaneous and emotional event. It was a rational choice meant to undermine, even sabotage, part of the company’s economic activities. Indeed, a year after these events I again met with some of the women who took part in them. They told me about the disruptive actions they had engaged in against Soprofel and how these actions had caused the agricultural firms considerable financial losses.My purpose here is to examine how women agricultural workers mobilize for their right to fair, and fairly compensated, work. I want to understand women’s autonomous agency at the margins of global agricultural production by examining how women farmworkers mobilize against the precarization of their work and continuing losses of their jobs. My focus on female agricultural workers’ agency is of particular interest. Within social movement and gender studies, women’s agency in labor organizing and resistance is usually overlooked. As shown by Maha El Said, Lena Meari, and Nicola Pratt (2015), and particularly in the Middle East and North Africa region, most attention goes to the more classical social organizations and civil society movements, where highly visible (and mostly male) actors tend to dominate the discourse.The mobilization against Soprofel perfectly illustrates the agricultural development model Morocco seeks to promote. Over the past three decades Morocco’s agricultural strategies reconfigured the social and economic organization of agricultural production. Alongside traditional family and subsistence farming models, agribusiness and corporate farming have dominated the Moroccan agrarian landscape. This modernization of the agricultural sector has resulted in uneven development among regions. Whereas some regions, like Souss Massa, benefited from state support for farming large plots of land and had access to irrigation, other regions had less state support, and peasants there worked small plots of land, depended on rain, and grew cash crops or tended livestock. The latter regions, like the Atlas and Anti-Atlas, served as reservoirs of labor for the former, further deepening peasants’ economic and social marginalization.Agricultural firms like Soprofel relocated to southern Morocco for abundant natural resources and deregulated labor. This approach is far from a new phenomenon; it is deeply rooted in Morocco’s colonial agrarian development policies. Indeed, Will D. Swearingen (1987) demonstrated that in the early 1930s the French colonial administration had already sought to establish in Morocco’s Souss Valley a “Californian” agricultural model. He argued that, due to Morocco’s closeness to Europe, cheap “native” labor, abundant water resources, mild climate, and rich earth, the colonial administration wanted to develop an agricultural export model to supply Europe with fruits and vegetables at considerably lower production costs. Thus, since the colonial era, Morocco’s agricultural policies have been rooted in creating cheap labor and providing resources to foreign and national companies to facilitate the supply of high-value-added crops to Europe at the cost of the agrarian landscape.Moreover, the rise of large-scale farming was coupled with waves of land dispossession during which both Moroccan and foreign capital increasingly coveted land in the Souss (Akesbi 2012; Bouchelkha 2017). Agricultural firms are essential to Morocco’s economy, contributing up to 14 percent of its GDP and strengthening its trade balance. Furthermore, in southern Morocco, the sector relies on two hundred thousand agricultural workers. Therefore fruits and vegetables are prioritized in agricultural development programs as an essential source of export income and job creation (Bouchelkha 2017). The state engagement in the modern sector and its disengagement in the traditional sector deepened the agrarian fragmentation. All these social changes in the agrarian structure forced peasants to migrate to different regions of Morocco or Europe in search of work. Southern Morocco became one of the main destinations for these marginalized and landless agribusiness workers.The neoliberal policies that prompted the rise of agricultural firms and commercial farming played an important role in integrating women into global agricultural production. Certainly, women have more access to independent wage labor within commercial farming. In southern Morocco, women were slowly integrated into farms and factories’ food processing, packaging, and cleaning duties at the beginning of the 1990s. From this time on, rural working women dominated both farms and packing stations, becoming the commonly preferred labor force of numerous export-oriented agribusinesses in Morocco and many peripheral countries (Moreno Nieto 2012). Women engaged mainly in nonmechanized labor on farms, such as sowing, harvesting, and picking. Gender is essential in instituting hierarchies and reproducing inequalities at the farms and packaging stations. Indeed, although women were able to secure wages for their labor, they were often concentrated in precarious and seasonal work. As a result, women farmworkers tend to be associated with working in deplorable labor conditions characterized by low and often ad hoc pay.Large-scale commercial farming employs ten thousand farmworkers earning poverty wages, working under substandard conditions, and facing many health and other issues due to their living and employment conditions. Reporting on the precariousness of the rural labor market, FairFood International (2014) explains that most of the laborers employed in the Moroccan agribusiness sector are paid less than the national minimum agricultural wage, which makes it difficult for women farmworkers to meet basic needs. The laborers work mainly in tomatoes and citrus farm production and packing stations. Agricultural capital’s quest for profit is strongly gendered and is shaped by social systems of hierarchies and power extending across globally dispersed production sites. Agricultural firms like Soprofel reproduce the gendered process of inequality by linking the most marginalized women with the most devalued forms of labor.Gendering agricultural labor made it considerably cheaper and thus facilitated southern Morocco’s large-scale farms’ process of accumulation. In this process precarity became the main feature of forms of labor and characterized working people’s lives. The neoliberal wave that has marked the world’s economy since the 1980s has enabled such a process. Indeed, within contemporary capitalism, nonstandard forms of contract became the prevalent employment relation, making labor increasingly “uncertain, unpredictable and risky from the point of view of the worker” (Kalleberg 2009: 2). Moreover, this ongoing restructuring of the agrifood sector through the flexibilization of labor and the creation of a temporary, seasonal, and informal workforce that can be mobilized at any time with lower costs played an important role in the increasing eruption of strikes, occupations, blockades, and labor protests in Souss Massa.These labor protests have become more regular and robust with the expansion of Moroccan agribusiness. From the mid-2000s on, the unions penetrated large-scale private farms. They arranged trainings, helping farmworkers understand the importance of having a union in the workplace and the necessity of organizing farmworkers. As a result, unionized farmworkers were increasingly aware of their rights and role in value creation. This has led them to stage production slowdowns, sit-ins, occupations, hunger strikes, and blockades or to participate in disruptive actions. Women’s participation in these protests is far from exceptional. Women farmworkers’ involvement in social mobilization challenged the perceived docility that prompted their insertion into the agribusiness sector in the first place. One female employee of Soprofel asserted: “I joined a union in 2007 and took to the streets to protest our dire working and living conditions. We do not want to ruin the country’s reputation; we only want to voice our demands and fight for our rights” (interview, August 2020).Over the past ten years many agricultural workers, primarily women migrants from other rural areas, have taken to the streets in protest over salaries, employment, and working conditions. Although in this interview the employee stated that these mobilizations tend to make no claims against the Moroccan state, many rallies are directed against the inefficiency of state institutions in protecting agricultural workers’ labor rights within the workplace. That was particularly the case in 2007–10, when agricultural workers, through their union representatives, filed repeated complaints to official agencies for their inability to force private agribusiness to comply with the 2004 labor code. Despite labor code gaps, farmworkers urged agricultural farms to implement the code and provide workers with better wages and social benefits.Moreover, the agricultural labor protests in the mid-2000s were characterized by demands requiring social security contributions, union rights, and reduced working hours. Within unions, women farmworkers rallied for their right to maternity leave, breastfeeding breaks, and access to nurseries for their children. The 2004 labor code opened spaces for women agricultural workers to legally demand social security contributions. According to labor law, permanent agricultural workers are entitled to pension retirement, health insurance, and maternity benefits. Before 2009 most agricultural employers had not paid their social security contributions and other allowances. As a result, agricultural workers staged occupations, strikes, and protests, forcing some international and national agribusinesses to pay these contributions. Thus the mobilization of farmworkers within the unions challenged social and economic inequalities and, through a rights-based approach, rallied to change unfair labor practices.If the mid-2000s protests were characterized by agricultural workers legally demanding that agribusiness in the export-oriented sector pay their social security contributions, during the past five decades farmworkers’ mobilizations shifted their demands from the right to decent working conditions to the right to work. These mobilizations came in response to the widespread wave of nonstandard forms of employment, making it more generalized within international and national agribusinesses. This process of work fragmentation and precarization played an important role in isolating workers and impacting their capacity for mobilization and collective action. While these processes have had some impact on the unions’ ability to mobilize the agricultural working class, they have not impacted agricultural workers’ capacity to voice their demands and organize. As job insecurity, as in the Soprofel case, increased, more and more women farmworkers rose to demand the right to a job or decent severance pay.Within this context, the women agricultural workers decided to take to the streets and protest their unfair layoff by setting up al-ʿUcha (fig. 2). The word has significant meanings for the workers, as it is one of the farmworkers’ slogans in the region, implying that “our [farmworker] rights will come only through al-ʿUcha.”Hanan and her fellow women farmworkers staged al-ʿUcha to put pressure on Soprofel’s representatives to either compensate them or give them back their jobs. In this regard, the occupation was their only leverage for negotiation. That is why they decided to engage in politics of sabotage, occupy the public space, block Soprofel’s subsidiary company’s door, and even prevent its workers from leaving until they got what they were due. Al-ʿUcha represents a symbolic power that allows these women at the margins of global food production to engage in forms of visibility politics. They aimed to make their concerns and demands visible not only to the company but also to the surrounding neighborhoods, making a public statement and manifesting their autonomous role in the workers’ resistance against exploitation. As Amina, an organizer of this occupation, told me: “We did not include unions. We held this al-ʿUcha as independent women agricultural workers. We did not want the local authorities pressuring the unions to stop this al-ʿUcha and open the doors of Maghreb-palm” (interview, November 2020).However, this action of sabotage created tension between the unionized and nonunionized women agricultural workers of the company. Although some women farmworkers found in this direct action a channel to force the company’s representatives to the negotiating table, others, mainly unionized ones like Hanan, did not conform to this form of action and mobilization. Indeed, Hanan would have preferred to follow the union’s procedures and engage in a rights-based approach to avoid falling into what she describes as “informal actions.” “You have to do things right,” she says. “We cannot just jump in like that without consulting the union offices.” Nevertheless, she was in the minority and had no choice but to follow the strategies decided by the group. So she joined the occupation, where she stayed for more than six months.In his study of the direct actions against the construction of the Newbury bypass in Devon, Andrew Barry (1999: 77) argued that demonstrations should be comprehended in their technical and political senses: “The protests are as much a technical as a political one: to demonstrate a truth which it has been otherwise impossible to demonstrate in public by other means.” For these women farmworkers, al-ʿUcha not only represents a means to demand their right to fair compensation but also mirrors Morocco’s development strategy. In fact, this uneven development has structured these women agricultural workers’ everyday lives. In Morocco’s rural areas, working and living in the precariat has become a mantra. As I have argued, in today’s global agricultural production, capital has used racial (by relocating to global South countries) and gender differences (by exploiting women) to produce cheap and docile bodies and generate more profit.Additionally, by engaging in al-ʿUcha, women farmworkers were trying to reinforce their “art of presence” (Bayat 2013, 2017). They also intended to challenge their ongoing invisibility, particularly as their mobilization received little attention from classical political organizations (fig. 3). As Aicha told me: “No one would understand that women are spending their days and nights sleeping in the streets. The women have become men. No one cares about your existence. We are left alone” (interview, February 2021).With the start of Ramadan in 2021 and nearly six months after their first night at al-ʿUcha, the women ended their occupation to seek better work opportunities. This decision came after months of waiting, which resulted in financial exhaustion and mental and physical fatigue. While some workers were able to negotiate better compensation, others, with their families and expenses, had no choice but to accept a small severance package. This fatigue is not insignificant but a strategy used by agricultural companies to force penniless workers to accept the amounts offered. Exhaustion politics, a term coined by Leonie Ansems de Vries and Marta Welander (2021) in their study of border control, is a tactic used by these companies to control labor unrest.However, female farmworkers insist on their active subjectivities despite this exhaustion and the long wait. Indeed, this subterranean form of women agricultural workers’ blockade is their only means of resistance, their only way to change the balance of power to their advantage. In this regard, al-ʿUcha shows us how women agricultural workers, far from the more visible urban centers and the media’s attention, create new ways of resisting precarity and challenging their so-called docility. Thus, rather than accept their homogenized wretchedness (Spivak 2008), these women rely on al-ʿUcha as a new space for resisting their marginality and perceived lack of power.In this essay I have attempted to argue how women agricultural workers produce new forms of resisting the ongoing casualization of agricultural workers in southern Morocco. In today’s globalization, capital’s main characteristic is its ability to relocate in search of cheaper and more flexible workers. Morocco’s investment-friendly strategies in agriculture favored such a process. The case of women agricultural workers provides a better understanding of how “capital makes rather than finds cheap female labor” (Salzinger 2003: 2) and how that “making of” cheap female labor is never just accepted by those who are exploited. Despite the flexibilization of work and the weakening of trade unions, women farmworkers develop structural and associational power to produce new forms of resistance.