tunisia after 14 january and its social and political economy - Refworld

T U N I S I A A F T E R 1 4 J A N U A R Y A N D I T S S O C I A L A N D P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M YT H E I S S U E S A T S T A K E I N A R E C O N F I G U R A T I O N O F E U R O P E A N P O L I C Ystrategy of controlling wages and lowering the conditions of job security. Competition betweenthe urban workforce and the workforce that has come from the rural world drags wages down..I.2.C. A transformation in the organisation of workWhat the discourse on the miracle also concealed was a transformation of the organizationof work and a general decline in conditions of employment for middle- and working-classcategories. The policy adopted by the public powers to consolidate the performance of theTunisian economy as it grew was in fact based on a wage freeze, the flexibility of the workforce,and even a loss of job security. The last social negotiations which took place in 2008 were agood illustration of this. It had been agreed to increase wages in the public sector by 4.7%per year over the next three years. But this increase was less than the rate of inflation in thoseyears, which went well over 5%, thereby auguring a deterioration in the buying power of themost modest social categories. 59 This wage freeze, in the interests of competitiveness, could beachieved only at the cost of disciplined and politically muzzled wage earners.Contract-based jobs (Al-mounawala) best symbolise this policy aimed at reducing the securityof working relations. It constitutes a hybrid form between temporary work and the externalisationof certain services – activities such as cleaning and caretaking. Apparently, Tunisia has fewerthan 150,000 wager-earners employed under this system of work, and, in the context of the BenAli regime, they were vulnerable to all sorts of abuses: 60 the privatisation of permanent contracts,the absence of Social Security cover, pressures on wages and poor working conditions thateven extended to their being deprived of days off and vacations, as the law provided for. Thissystem of employment was set up in 1996, and was practised in particular in the public sector,and affected no fewer than 100,000 employees. 61 The situation is the same in tourism as it is inindustry: hotel proprietors are obliged to sell off overnight stays cheap under the pressure oftour operators on whom they are totally independent. This drags wages down and reducesthe job security of their staff. This spiral embodies the jamming of the tourist sector and thebad management choices that have been made: the lack of their own capital and the hugedebts incurred by these establishments push hotel owners into a frantic quest for profitability,even if this means bringing prices really low, and ignoring the quality of the services they offer.This creates a vicious circle. 62 The lowering of quality, explained by the lowering of the price ofan overnight stay so as to attract the maximum number of customers, provides tour operatorswith opportunities to exert even more pressure on Tunisian hotel owners who, eager to seizeany activity because of their debts and pressure from bankers, accept increasingly drastic59 ‘Négociations salariales: le dégel après l’impasse?’, Webmanagercenter.com (accessed on19.11.2008) and ‘Tunisie, l’inflation continue d’augmenter. A quand les négociations salariales?’,Africanmanagercenter.com (accessed on 11.05.2008).60 B. Hibou, ‘Work discipline, discipline in Tunisia: complex and ambiguous relations’, African Identities, 6,August 2009, pp. 327-352, and H. Meddeb, ‘Tunisie, pays émergent?’ Information updated by interviewsin Tunis, March 2011. The abolition of this employment system constitutes one of the main demands oftrade union militants: see ‘Le syndicat des métiers des services condamne le laxisme dans l’abolition durégime d’al-mounawala dans le secteur public’, www.kalima-tunisie.info (accessed on 16 April 2010;the article is in Arabic, the translation is ours).61 ‘Vers l’abolition d’al-mounawala dans le secteur public’, www.tunisia-today.net (accessed on19.2.2011, article in Arabic, our translation).62 B. Hibou, The Force of Obedience, tr. by Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), ch. 5, and‘Work discipline, discipline in Tunisia: complex and ambiguous relations’.41T h e r h e t o r i c o f ‘ s t a b i l i t y ’ a n d t h e e c o n o m i c ‘ m i r a c l e ’