NPF Cycle One Fellows and Projects

Hocine Zobiri: The State, Sovereignty, and Union Movements in Algeria: Independent Unions as a Model

 

Abstract: In spite of the internal crises and external repression faced by labor and union movements across the Arab region today, they have managed to increase their mobilizing power and persist as central factors in the many of the recent transformations taking place across the Arab world. In this paper, which focuses on the case of independent workers’ movements in Algeria, I argue that this persistence and success is due to their organizational and mobilization capacities in which they have long-standing experience and expertise. Historic factors and ideological framing strategies have helped labor movements maintain clear objectives-- contrary to the new, spontaneous, social movements that lack clear plans. Of course, the success of new forms of worker mobilization have also prompted the state to devise new ways to clamp down on them and deploy arbitrary measures against them. Control and  surveillance attempts have taken different forms including containment, bribery, legal restraints, threat of imprisonment and other forms of surveillance imposed by ruling political regimes in the Arab world in general and in Algeria in particular. The analysis here offers a historical examination of cycles of struggle that tend to pass through two kinds of cyclical phases: periods of accord and clientelistic cooperation between state and labor, and then periods of turmoil, as unions have become more bold and independent and states have responded by moves to undercut and repress. And this paper elaborates a distinct paradigm of popular sovereignty defined by autonomous workers’ practices of organization and self-rule, in particular I identify the Algerian worker’s relation with time and space inside the factory, which is related to his mobility and work, which are tied to the movement of the machines as a form of the classical industrial worker, upon whom hopes of social change are built and which tie into forms of time and place tied to a local culture.

 

Hocine Zobiri has been a lecturer at the University of Zian Achor in Djelfa, Algeria, Institute for Social and Human Sciences, since 2004. He currently works as a researcher at the Center for Research in Applied Economics and Development (CREAD) in Algeria. He holds a PhD in in Sociology, specializing in organization and labor, where the subject of his dissertation was "Union Elites and the Strategy of Union Activity." He completed his MA in Cultural Sociology in 2004, where his thesis was entitled "The Local Political Elite and the Stakes of Local Governance.” He previously specialized in electrical maintenance at the National Institute for Electrical Maintenance in Algeria. He is also a member of the editorial board of the journal "Social Studies", published by the Baseera Research Center. He was part of many research projects, including: The New Social Movements in Algeria, CNEPRU, 2013, On the Economic Elite, CREAD, 2012, The New Contractors in Algeria, CNEPRU, 2012, and the Trade Union Movements in Algeria, CREAD, 2004-2007. He has also worked as a junior expert with the European Commission on the MEDA project for the rehabilitation of economic institutions in Algeria. He has taken part in many national and international forums in Algeria, where his interventions revolved around union and social movements, which can be considered his main fields of interest.