ABSTRACT
Among the most remarkable things about the Tunisian revolution of 2011 was the role of the national trade union (UGTT). Joel Beinin has shown the critical importance this institutional power gave Tunisian workers in comparison to Egypt. I argue that its pre independence history is inadequate to understand this phenomenon given the weakness of Tunisian labour in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, it can be traced to elite political crises of the 1970s, relatively continuous base militancy from 1970 to 2011 and the collapse of state military relations in the early 1990s. I use State Department archives combined with data from the International Labor Organization and the Tunisian Ministry of Social Affairs to make this case. These results support the idea that co-optation of Tunisian unions was far less extensive than pre 2011 studies suggested, but that labour unrest was less widespread and less disruptive to strategic industries in comparison to 2011 and after.
