Working class youth transitions as a litmus test for change: labour crisis and social conflict in Arab Mediterranean countries

ABSTRACT

The article reconceptualizes the issue of youth precariousness and unemployment by taking empirical data from five Arab Mediterranean countries, namely Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Occupied Palestinian Territories and Lebanon. It demonstrates that youth worsening labour conditions point not only to the problems of a specific age-cohort in entering the labour market but also to a much larger process of change that can be best understood as the creation of a new working class which is by far more precarious and fragmented than the post-independence one.

The reaction to the profound reconfiguration of labour relations is intense, as the unparalleled labour-related protests in the region demonstrate. However, current dynamics of mobilization reveal many tensions between wage, secure workers, and precarious unemployed youth, as well as between secure-workers themselves due to growing fragmentation of the working class, but also to repressive and divide et impera strategies carried out by regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab Mediterranean Countries
• labour mobilization
• structural Adjustment Programs
• working class
• youth

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Power2youth (March 2014- May 2017), Theme SSH.2013.4.1–2, Facing Transition in the South East Mediterranean Area: Empowering the Young Generation, Grant agreement 612782. The project also included the case of Turkey which will not be taken into consideration in this article that concentrates on the Arab Mediterranean region as a sub-unit of the larger MENA. For more information on the project and the fieldwork see: Nadine Sika, ‘Beyond the Impasse? Dynamics of Youth Agency in times of Crisis’, forthcoming in this special issue. See also the project website at http://power2youth.iai.it/project.html.

2. P2YMeso level research – youth collective agency, http://power2youth.iai.it/publications/publications-for/Youth%20Collective%20Agency%20(Meso-Level).html.

3. See Buehler (2015) and M.C. Catusse (1998) for Morocco; Zemni (2013) and Gobe (2008) for Tunisia; Clement (2009) for Egypt.