Springboards or Wedges: Communal and Union Solidarity in Colonial Tunisia

• In Event: Labor-Community Solidarity

Abstract

The literature on unionization has convincingly shown how strong communal ties outside the workplace can serve as a springboard to class organization at work, but also as a wedge allowing employers or the state to divide workers. In this paper I ask what explains why one happens instead of the other? To show this issue through the contrasting trajectories of dock and mine workers in colonial Tunisia. Tunis dockworkers were among the first Tunisian workers to organize and the core of the country’s first nationalist union, but starting in the 1930s found themselves divided between Tunisian and Algerian members, and ultimately across opposite sides of the cold war. In contrast, mine workers in the Gafsa basin were comparatively late to unionize, with most early strikes ethnically bound and thus too small to be effective, but starting in the mid 1930s they would build the most united, cohesive, and militant labor movements anywhere in Tunisia. Through these cases, I question both theories arguing that union and other forms of solidarity are either automatically contradictory or necessarily complementary, and critique the argument that homogeneity promotes collective action. Instead, I suggest that the sequence of recruitment may provide a better way to understand these different outcomes.

Author

• Keenan Wilder, Brown University