Focus: Mission impossible? Strengthening workers' rights in the MENA region is difficult but worth it

Abstract

8 | International Union Rights | 25/2 FOCUS | TRADE UNION RIGHTS IN THE MENA COUNTRIES Mission impossible? Strengthening workers’ rights in the MENA region is difficult but worth it Every year, when the ITUC launches its Global Rights Index, the MENA region features prominently as ‘the world’s worst region for workers’, with several Arab countries in the Top 10 of the worst scores. These exhibit regular and systematic violations of rights, or no guarantee of rights, partly due to the breakdown of the rule of law: All MENA countries are regularly placed in those categories. Forced labour, state repression, discrimination and the exclusion of migrants from labour law are among the most notorious violations of rights. But less obvious, though not less severe, violations occur on a day-to-day basis. “Is there even such a thing as Arab trade unions?”, is a question I get to hear regularly in my work, coming from Germans or Europeans that I cross, an incredulous look on their faces, ‘that must be really tough’. For sure, the historic path of the labour movement in the region has not been an easy one. From colonial powers to authoritarian one-partystates , workers have been facing difficult circumstances. Arab states have deployed a wide array of strategies to weaken genuine workers’ representation, ranging from open repression to cooption or leadership capture. The evolution of the political economy of the Arab states in the last decades has prevented most trade unions from becoming the strong, vibrant forces effectively protecting workers’ rights and shaping socially just societies that we would all like to see and that would be needed to make progress. The economic situation aggravates this trend: while many Arab states played a role of taking care for the poor to a certain extent following independence, decades of attachment to neoliberal policies – and elite concentration of wealth generated by rents – have since left their mark on the region. Today, unemployment and informal employment are pervasive, inequalities soar and terrorism and armed conflict prevent economic recovery. Social justice was all over the protest banners a few years ago at the height of what has mistakenly been termed as the ‘Arab Spring’, but most workers haven’t even come one step closer to it now. Marginalisation is the norm. Individual workers are marginalised within labour markets – informal workers, migrant workers, young workers, in many cases female workers; entire regions are marginalised within the countries’ economic landscapes. The MENA region as a whole is marginalised in the world economy, and is less integrated into global supply chains than the rest of the world. The obvious exception are the economically affluent Gulf countries, the ‘super-rich’ of the Arab world, who expand their global investments to a worrying extent, given that they may also export extremely difficult working conditions and a ruthless disrespect for workers’ rights. Trade unions in transformation As Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, we have been committed to supporting the labour movement worldwide for much of our 90+ years history. We are a close partner of the German trade union movement, of the ITUC and the Global Union Federations, and the same holds true for many of the more than 100 country offices who work closely with trade union centres or sector unions. In the MENA region, FES work first started with reaching out to trade unions in the Maghreb countries back in the 1960s, long before FES offices were opened in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria in the 1980s and 2000s. The difficult political evolution in the region also took its toll on our trade union work, though. In many cases, we have been much more involved with the wider civil society, though we have mostly been able to maintain a focus on social and labour policies even then. The uprisings in the years following 2010 also brought some changes in the Arab trade union landscape, and a major achievement was made when the Arab Trade Union Confederation (ATUC) was founded in October 2014, providing a new platform for exchange on regional matters for Arab unions, stretching across North Africa, the Gulf and the Arab Middle East, from Mauritania to Palestine. ATUC has stepped up debates on political issues...