Abstract
Based on qualitative interviews and archival research, Labor Politics in North Africa is an effective and well-documented account of the trade unions’ role in the 2011 uprisings of Egypt and Tunisia. The book is a comparison of two North African countries whose regimes relied on authoritarian corporatism to manage labor–state relations. Yet, while the corporatist system was similarly brought down by the Arab Spring mobilizations in both cases, Tunisian organized labor played an influential role in the political transition and contributed to democratization while Egyptian labor was marginalized and eventually suffered a restoration of authoritarianism.
Ian Hartshorn sets out to answer two different but interrelated research questions, which are presented in the introductory chapter. Why did Egyptian and Tunisian corporatism collapse? Why did the trade unions play an influential role in the political transition in Tunisia but less so in Egypt? The first two empirical chapters, that is, Chapter 2 on corporatist collapse and Chapter 3 on the political transition, present the empirical evidence for Egypt, and the following two chapters carry out a parallel operation for Tunisia. Chapter 6 discusses the process of constitution making in the two countries as well as the relations between organized labor and Islamist parties. The concluding chapter draws out the implications of the monograph for theory building and further research.
For what concerns corporatist collapse, Hartshorn identifies three main factors for both Egypt and Tunisia: neoliberal structural adjustment, the flexibilization of the labor market, and the decline of union power (the latter is defined somewhat narrowly as union capacity to influence state policymaking). The two countries’ systems of labor institutions were established in the years following independence, in the context of a developmentalist policy framework characterized by state-led industrialization, an expansion of the public sector, increasing job security in the formal sector, and a rapid growth in welfare provision. These benefits to the workers came together with a regimentation of their representation within a state-backed single trade union confederation that was expected (at least in theory) to keep the expression of their grievances compatible with the reproduction of the regime, in what is known as authoritarian corporatism. As is well known, the developmentalist project entered a crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, and eventually the Egyptian and Tunisian political economies fell under neoliberal restructuring. This process put the corporatist institutional arrangement under growing pressures, as the concessions to the workers that sustained it in the post-independence decades were increasingly eroded. The gist of this explanation of corporatist collapse is consistent with other works in the field, across theoretical and terminological divides.
The explanatory strategy for the second question is more unique. Here the point at issue becomes a “similar cases/different outcomes” puzzle: Why, in a parallel context of corporatist collapse, did the Tunisian trade unions have a significant impact on the political transition while their Egyptian counterparts did not? The author singles out three additional factors: internal linkages (particularly relationships among unions and between unions and political parties), external linkages (the relationships between national unions and international labor actors), and incorporation (the historical insertion of the unions in the post-independence political system and the self-legitimating strategies that it provides to the unions). In Tunisia, the “legacy union,” Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), managed to keep the allegiance of the vast majority of union members and labor activists, cooperated with the “secularist” political parties without being co-opted by them, secured the support of what the author calls “global labor,” and successfully defended its legitimacy based on the key role of the organization in the national liberation struggle, despite the fact that its top leadership had been more or less co-opted by the regime at different points of its history. In Egypt, the state-backed Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) lost members and activists to the independent union movement, was manipulated by different political actors, lost credibility in the eyes of global labor, and struggled to defend its legitimacy given the fact that it was originally created by the state itself. The Egyptian independent unions fragmented into rivaling confederations, were relatively powerless in the game of party politics, were assisted by global labor in a way that did not incentivize unity, and did not have a long history to draw upon to establish their legitimacy. In Hartshorn’s account, the combination of these elements explains the UGTT’s success in contributing significantly to a democratic constitution, on the one hand, and the ineffectiveness of the Egyptian labor movement, on the other hand.
Labor Politics in North Africa provides a solid and thought-provoking causal narrative of the role of the trade unions in contemporary Egyptian and Tunisian politics, which is a topic of great importance not only for scholars working on the Middle East and North Africa. The volume could have been strengthened, however, by a more explicit theoretical justification of the explanatory strategy, which—while perfectly legitimate—is only one among many possible options. Marxist accounts, for example, would have focused more on issues relating to the making and unmaking of balances of class power, understood as the result of historical trajectories of struggles in more “agency-oriented” varieties (i.e., strands of Marxism that treat “struggle as an independent variable” shaping society, whose outcomes cannot be fully predetermined by looking at pre-existing factors) or as the manifestations of the dynamics of capitalist development in more structuralist sorts. In this respect, it is useful to remember Michael Burawoy’s reflections on the Millian comparative method: “In pretending that theory emerges from the facts, induction hides other sources of theory, namely sociological intuitions and methodological rules. Rather than theory being elaborated as a logical structure with empirical implications, it is presented as a summary of the facts” (“Two Methods in Search of Science,” 1989). This is meant to suggest neither that Hartshorn is unaware of such limitations of comparativism nor that comparisons should not be used. It is rather a way of saying that, given the space availability provided by a monograph, the reader would have benefited from a theoretical justification of the selection of explanatory factors. In any case, Labor Politics in North Africa constitutes an important contribution to the field and is certainly worth reading.