My research work on the trade union movement in Tunisia extends from the crucial role that the UGTT (Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail; Tunisian General Labour Union) have played in post-independence Tunisian culture, as a site of resistance to the regime, as a space of support for fledgling intellectuals, as a meeting place. In 2016, I wrote a short book, Confluency (tarafud) between trade unionism, culture and revolution in Tunisia, which brings together two essay I published in journals The book is freely available to download here; the book was reviewed by Nathanael Manonne for The Journal of North African Studies. In part of the book I argued that the role of the UGTT as a central bastion of Tunisian cultural and intellectual production has long been overlooked in scholarship; if we are to understand the direction and proliferation of Tunisian culture both before and after the revolution, we must attend to the way that the trade union movement has long intersected with it.

The UGTT is a fundamental and central driver of cultural production in Tunisia. It has also been central to opposition and Leftist culture. You can read more about both of these on the page Tunisian Literature, in particular concerning Awlad Ahmad, Tunisian poet and opposition figure.

My particular focus on the direction of cultural production after the revolution, and the role that the UGTT has played in steering that production, is also central to an article I wrote for Workers of the World: International Journal of Strikes and Social Conflict, entitled “No Ordinary Union: The role of UGTT in the Tunisian path to revolution and transition”, available to download here. This article outlines and critically records the role of the Tunisian labour union, UGTT, in the revolution of 2010-11 and its crucial impact on the transition period. It seeks to demonstrate that far from the spontaneity theory of the revolution and the claims that local agency was incidental to the uprisings, what might be called the Tunisian path to revolution and transition was in large part due to the structured and structuring role of this unique union.

I have also written extensively on the UGTT in the media, both in English and in Arabic. Most recently, for The Middle East in London, in “Tunisia’s Ballooning Civil Society” available to download here. In this article, I argue that the creation of a vibrant civil society remains a positive outcome of the Revolution and perhaps the main guarantor that its ideals and goals are kept on the agenda. For boundary 2, I traced the history and influence of unionisation in Tunisia. For OpenDemocracy, I have written two articles. The first was focused on how the UGTT has functioned in Tunisia’s civil society, and how it has become the focal point of a specifically Tunisian protest configuration; in the second, I provided an historical perspective on the first general strike since 1978, which was organised in 2012. The UGTT provided considerable support to both general strikes, this one and the one in 1978, with its very existence being threatened by anti-union governmental activities.

During the 2014 conference I held at the National Library of Tunisia, as part of my project on New Humanism, I took the conference participants to the UGTT building, shown above to the left, for a study day on trade unionism in Tunisia and the role of the UGTT in Tunisia’s intellectual, cultural and artistic scenes, some images of which you can see below.