ABSTRACT
Movements of the Unemployed in Morocco1
The problem of unemployment and access to a job in the public sector has fueled, over the past few years, two major movements in Morocco. The first one is widely known as the “unemployed graduates’ movement” (“harakat al-mo’attalin hamili al-shahadat” in Arabic, also referred to by the French expression of “diplôméschômeurs”). The “unemployed graduates’ movement” is not a new phenomenon as its history goes back to the early 1990s. The second movement grew out of a succession of contentious campaigns between February and October 2011, targeting the Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP, Cheriffian Agency of Phosphate),2 the State-owned phosphate monopoly. Inspired by the events on Tahrir Square (Cairo, Egypt) and by the Moroccan 20 February Movement,3 unemployed youth of Khouribga set up an encampment in front of the local administration of the OCP, renaming the place “Maydan Attachghil” (employment square) and occupying it for almost one month (Choukrallah 2011). The violent repression of the occupation on March 15, 2011 marked the beginning of a turbulent period in the mining region that lasted almost one year. Both movements, the unemployed graduates and the youth of the mining region, claim that their causes and demands are legitimate because of the supposed socio-economic exclusion suffered by their constituencies.
