The political consequences of labor mobilization have attracted the attention of political scientists since the early 1900s, when the events of the Russian Revolution first alerted scholars to the potency of the strike as an agent for social change. While much of the literature on the dynamics of labor protest has focused on Western-liberal democracies, the role of workers and trade unions in pro-democracy protests in Poland, South Africa, Brazil, Taiwan, and South Korea has shifted the discipline's focus and brought renewed attention to the ways that labor can support political transitions within autocratic regimes. In his ambitious new book, Ian Hartshorn shifts the focus even further to highlight the consequences of labor activism in a relatively understudied area in the literature on authoritarian labor politics—the Middle East. In an original and broad analysis, he examines the methods and modes of labor mobilization in two “unlikely” cases (pg. 2)—Tunisia and Egypt—offering meticulous explanation of why worker activism in these countries increased during the late 2000s, leading both countries to experience significant labor-backed revolutions in 2010–2011, and why protest patterns ultimately diverged during the post-revolutionary period.
At the core of Hartshorn's argument are two distinct, but interrelated explanations. Revolutionary labor, he argues, emerges as a consequence of the state's efforts to channel workers’ grievances through corporatist arrangements in the post-independence period and the subsequent failure of these arrangements following the introduction of neo-liberal market reforms—a phenomenon which he terms “corporatist collapse.” In the post-revolutionary period, however, unions’ continued strength and survival depends on their ability to establish convincing rhetorical claims to legitimacy that will attract internal support from domestic political actors and external backing within the global labor community.
Drawing upon a breadth of qualitative interviews, Hartshorn makes his case through a detailed, historically grounded account of the rise of labor unions in Egypt and Tunisia during the late 2000s and their shifting relationships with the state, political parties and “global labor.” Specifically, Hartshorn finds that Egyptian unions, despite a promising turn towards militancy in the late 2000s, have been relatively ineffective in organizing and defending their interests to state policymakers in the wake of the January 25th revolution. This ineffectualness on the part of organized labor emerged as a consequence of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation's (ETUF) close association with the Mubarak regime, which left the union movement internally corrupted and prone to fractionalization, as seen with the founding of the independent trade union movement in 2007. Such dynamics were further exacerbated by the actions of global labor organizations such as the ILO and ITUC, who (inadvertently) undercut labor strength by promoting a narrative of trade union pluralism while simultaneously failing to deliver adequate support to Egypt's nascent independent trade unions. As a consequence, on the heels of regime transition, the Egyptian trade union emerged divided, weakened, and with little in the way of infrastructural or financial resources to support the demands of an increasingly restive working class. For Hartshorn, this weakness set the stage for the ultimate subordination of the labor movement by the state—beset by infighting and competition, the union movement became an easy target for cooptation by illiberal political forces, leading labor to take a prominent role in the resurgence of authoritarianism during the 2013 military coup, less than three years after the working class participated in Mubarak's ouster.
By contrast, Tunisian unions managed to survive the post-revolutionary period largely intact. In the face of an early rank-and-file versus union leadership split, the country's main union—the Union Général Tunisienne du Travail—was able to tamp down internal dissent by reforming its organizational structure and incorporating new militant cadres into its leadership. In so doing, it drew upon its significant reserve of anticolonial and revolutionary legitimacy to maintain union cohesion—by framing itself as the unifying “umbrella” of diverse political trends and the constant defender of the oppressed, the union was able to restrain its militant base and discourage the formation of independent unions by disaffected members. At the same time, the union's revolutionary history was oriented externally towards the foreign labor community to dissuade global labor from backing upstart unions and promoting narratives of trade union pluralism. In addition, the union's own decision to maintain its autonomy from the formal political system and instead form loose linkages with multiple political parties, kept the UGTT above the fray of quotidian political battles and established it as a neutral arbiter in the postrevolutionary period. Thus, throughout the revolutionary and transitional process Tunisian unions were able to capitalize on their strength to deliver both economic benefits for their members and a successful transition to democratic governance.
In exploring the variegated fates of North African trade unions, Hartshorn offers a sophisticated sociology of labor which spans three diverse literatures—debates on the consequences of market reforms, the literature on the dynamics of labor protest, and scholarship on democratization. However, any such far reaching book must contain shortcomings. Ironically, the book's primary contribution—the deep historical analysis embedded within its case studies—is also a central weakness. Indeed, while his case studies provide a compelling account of the varying relationships among labor, domestic/foreign power brokers, and the state, the connection between the book's theoretical arguments and its empirical material is not always clear, leaving some of the book's most important insights buried in an array of details. For example, the book's most innovative argument—that the global labor community's efforts to promote union pluralism may actually disempower labor movements—gets short shrift in comparison to a lengthy discussion on union's internal linkages, which is filled with extraneous details on party histories and platforms rather than their substantive relationship to unions per se. At the same time, the specificity of his case study analysis begs the question of his argument's generalizability to other cases, an issue which is only weakly addressed in the book's final chapter.
Yet perhaps the biggest shortcoming of the book is theoretical, specifically, the mismatch between the analysis’ invocation of Collier and Collier's (Shaping the Political Arena, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991) theoretical constructs and method and their actual execution in the text. To begin, Hartshorn's analysis adopts the language of labor incorporation while stripping it of its original meaning—rather than signifying the method by which states attempt to institutionalize the labor movement and bring them under its political control, incorporation in Hartshorn's theory refers to the unions’ own mythologies about their history and foundation. This difference is never fully justified in the book's text, and will no doubt prove jarring to those familiar with Shaping the Political Arena. More important, Hartshorn defines his critical juncture at the moment of incorporation, arguing that the relationship established between unions and the state during this period defined their future ability to invoke credible claims to revolutionary legitimacy. However, while Hartshorn rightly places the juncture at the incorporation period, he fails to fully appreciate the vast differences between his cases pre-incorporation. As he notes, Tunisia's union predated the formation of the Tunisian state; thus its autonomy from the state was not a legacy of incorporation but a consequence of historical developments. By contrast, the ETUF was admittedly, “made by the state” (p. 59), during Nasser's attempt to corral potential opposition following the 1952 Free Officers coup. Since rhetorical claims to legitimacy and autonomy play such a crucial role in the analysis—shaping everything from union's own internal politics to their relationships with external backers—it is worrisome that his main objects of study began life at such divergent points on this dimension.
These criticisms, however are not intended to discount the overall positive contribution of this book, which is significant. This ambitious book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of fields, including contentious politics, social movements, democratization, and Middle East studies. Moreover, given the extensive body of information it offers on labor organization and mobilization, the book offers an invitation for scholars of the Middle East to reconsider unions as a subject of academic interest. Ultimately, the true promise of the book is the areas for exploration it affords to future scholars. Given the vast terrain it covers, it will no doubt be an essential referent for forthcoming work on labor and political transition in the Middle East.
