Where were we?
In late 2010, a group of Jordan’s top intellectuals and women’s rights activists gathered at the Royal Cultural Institute in Amman to discuss how to better protect women under Jordan’s laws. Amidst the crowd of mostly upper middle class elites, a working class man from rural Jordan stood up. “Where were you?” He asked them.
The man was Muhammad Snayd, the leader and spokesperson of the Day-Waged Labor Movement. His movement had organized a sleep-in outside Jordan’s Royal Court to protest for a living wage and better labor rights.
Most of those who had participated in the sleep-in were poor, working class women from hyper-conservative areas of Jordan. They braved the danger and stigma attached to their radical demonstration in the hopes of pressuring for a better life and a future for their children.
“These are women from the governorates. Where were you? Why didn’t you support them?” Snayd asked them.
Nobody responded, and Snayd eventually sat down.
The Day-Wage Labor Movement was utterly ignored by Jordan’s middle and upper middle class, and risks being forgotten entirely by the rest of the world, despite it being one of the most momentous achievements for the region’s working women and working class.
It was one of the most profound and effective rights movements in the 21st century and can be used as a global blueprint on how to effectively organize vulnerable populations into powerful movements.
But you’ve likely never heard of it.
Al Bawaba asked Sara Ababneh why that is. Dr. Ababneh is an Assistant Professor at the University of Jordan's Center for Strategic Studies and is one of the only scholars spending time studying the movement and how it fits into the global struggle against poverty and powerlessness.
Dr. Sara Ababneh (courtesy of Columbia University)
She claims that although the movement helped empower thousands of women across the country, it didn’t easily fit into the current discourse surrounding women’s empowerment, which often depoliticizes their oppression and seeks to mitigate it through individualized projects and charity work.
This is because the movement never understood itself as a women’s movement but as a worker’s movement dedicated to economic justice.
Dr. Ababneh tells Al Bawaba the currently dominant approach to women’s empowerment hides the structures at play oppressing entire communities, especially women within them.
It’s a kind of “NGO-ization” of oppression, of ignoring massive inequalities between nations and people and thinking its symptoms, like poverty, debt and joblessness, can be solved through individually funded and supported projects staffed by consultants, volunteers and experts.
Solving oppression is now a job relegated to the growing NGO industry.
The failure to promote the Day-Waged Labor Movement as a model is a symptom of a global failure in understanding how to effectively promote marginalized groups’ rights in a globalized world economy.
In her conversation with Al Bawaba, Dr. Ababneh explores how the global community can adjust its approach and strategize more effectively to empower local communities. For her, that means starting with the ground-up, grassroots Day-Waged Labor Movement.
What Was The Day-Waged Labor Movement?
The Day-Waged Labor Movement was comprised of Jordan’s vulnerable working class and cut across strictly enforced gender divisions.
Its organizers and members came from a particularly precarious sub-class of workers called day-waged laborers, who were hired on a temporary basis with no labor protections. Their jobs paid less than minimum wage and often them to enter into a debt traps in order to afford the costs of living and supporting their family.
“Most of the women and men I met lived in governorates,” or rural areas Ababneh recalls, noting that many of whom were single parents.
Ababneh tells the story of Sakeena, a widow whose life “was just a cycle of debt.”
“In order for her to get through the month, she had to borrow money from people. The moment she got her salary, she had to pay it back. So basically [on] day three of having received her salary, she was borrowing again.”
Sakeena’s inability to escape her endless debt due to her low wage is a common story throughout Jordan, the Middle East and the rest of the world.
Another member of the movement worked at a private chicken farm, where she was forced to work late into the night, which, as a woman, is illegal under Jordan’s laws. The employees protested their conditions and were all promptly fired. When the regional government forced the farm to rehire them, they complied but paid the workers even less than they did before.
Protesters demonstrate against IMF-backed austerity policies in 2018 (AFP/FILE, Rami Khoury/Al Bawaba)
One of the movement’s founders was Muhammad Snayd, who had petitioned for years to be hired as a permanent employee to no avail. Desperate, he sent a letter directly to the late king of Jordan asking for a full-time job. Instead of hiring him, his immediate boss accosted him for his efforts to secure his own employment.
By 2006, individuals were beginning to hit their breaking point.
During one of his attempts to get hired at the Ministry of Agriculture in Amman, Snayd met two other day-waged laborers trying to do the same. Realizing their individualized demands to be hired won’t be met, they decide to organize a protest together.
“They decide that on the First of May, they want to stage a protest,” Ababneh says.
“Labor Day.”
Thirteen people showed up to their first protest outside the Ministry of Agriculture; seven of them were women. In the next protest a few weeks later, over 60 day-waged laborers showed.
The demonstrations captured the imagination of Jordan’s precarious class, whose feelings of desperation and hopelessness hit a breaking point. Many simply could not live any longer in their situation.
The movement exploded, and hundreds joined the weekly demonstrations.
The Sleep-In and the Movement’s Result
Royal Court in Amman, Jordan (Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan)
After months of protests, the movement organized a central committee and selected Snayd as its spokesperson and leader. The government, seeing the movement as only growing more robust as time went by, initially promised to hire them full-time, but were stalling the negotiations.
The committee decided that a radical action was needed, one that upped the stakes for all parties involved and adequately expressed the frustration and pressure felt by the movement’s members.
The women on the committee proposed to organize a sleep-in outside the Royal Court overnight; an idea that was initially rebuffed by the men due to the dangers involved.
A woman being seen in public with an unrelated man can be socially risky enough, but to leave the house and sleep outside next to them can endanger their safety.
“For most women’s rights activists in Jordan” Ababneh claims, these women would be considered ‘disempowered.
“And yet, culturally, they do this most radical form of protest.” Ababneh notes that she hasn’t heard of any other rights group in the Middle East that performed a sleep-in before or since.
Their families, who recognized the women’s struggles and unique opportunity to stage a public act of resistance, encouraged them to go ahead with the demonstration.
The radical act was given local media attention for a brief time. But most importantly, it illustrated the lengths the workers were willing to go in support of their cause. As a result, the government was put on the defensive and eventually capitulated to the demands of the movement.
After years of organizing and protests, the Day-Waged Labor Movement successfully got its members hired permanently with a guaranteed minimum wage. In the process, they also raised the minimum wage from JD150 ($211) to JD190 ($268), lifting hundreds of thousands of other workers’ salaries.
“In my opinion also, their protests from 2006 onwards is really what enabled people in Jordan to protest at the beginning of the Arab Uprisings in 2011-12,” Ababneh says.
“Jordan was one of the first countries to start protesting. And where were they protesting? Not in Amman [the capital city], but in Dhiban!” a small, rural community of about 10,000 people.
“And who were the people protesting? Day-Waged laborers, teachers, Aqaba port workers, phosphate workers: workers who had already mobilized,” thanks to the coordinated efforts of the Day-Waged Labor Movement, she added.
According to her, the Day-Waged Labor Movement’s formula for success enabled other labor groups from around the country to demand better legal protections.
“This set the groundwork that enabled the protests of the Jordanian popular movement to even happen in 2011-12. Without that, I don’t think we would have been able to protest in the same way in Jordan.”
Collective Forgetting and Salvaging a Broken Discourse
A Jordanian farmer near the Dead Sea (AFP/FILE)
“This is one of the biggest achievements, in my opinion, in the history of women’s rights in Jordan, and it happened outside the women’s movement,” Ababneh says.
The intellectual community of Jordan’s dismissive attitude towards Snayd and his cause, Ababneh claims, is emblematic of the larger failure to recognize the structural problems creating a global class of precarious people.
Ababneh pins this failure on the NGO-ization of development and discourse related to oppression and precarity, which blinds advocates from seeing grassroots movements framed in terms of labor rights rather than women’s empowerment.
For a problem to be NGO-ized, according to Ababneh, it is stripped of its economic and political context; the structural inequalities that produce that problem are ignored, and individualized projects are made to remedy that symptom without tackling the wider context that produces it in the first place.
An example Ababneh briefly discusses is a group of children’s rights NGOs that went into the Gaza Strip to provide post-traumatic therapy services to child victims of bombings. At a town hall meeting, representatives of the NGOs were met by angry Gazans, who exclaimed that they did not want NGOs to help their children deal with the trauma of the bombings: they wanted the NGOs to help stop the bombings.
The prevalence and reliance on individual, specialized projects within the development sector, Ababneh says, has helped whitewash the real causes of so much inequality and marginalization in the Middle East and beyond, and has spiraled into its own lucrative industry of well-paid consultants, experts and workers all too myopically focused on symptoms of global inequality.
In this context, the Day-Waged Labor Movement began, grew momentously, changed the political and economic landscape of Jordan, helped make networks of rights and labor groups and then faded away—all without being noticed by prominent NGOs, or the comfortable class of rights advocates.
It never sold itself as a charity project or part of a global effort to empower women in poor communities. It understood itself as a workers’ movement to take power away from exploitative industries and unresponsive bureaucracies and put it back in the hands of workers.
In their demands for economic justice, a powerful political message of equality reverberated throughout Jordan.
Protesters in Amman demonstrate against IMF-backed austeriy measures in 2018 (AFP/FILE)
To adapt the dominant, NGO-ized approach to rights advocacy and development, Ababneh recommends a ground-up approach like the one used to craft the Day-Waged Labor Movement.
“We need to start rethinking leftist theory from what is happening right now. [Those] who can teach us most about leftist theory today are workers’ movements and movements on the ground, because they actually know what they’re doing.”
“They are not people who are in desperate need to be saved by us but they’re actually the experts who we need to study and understand,” she added.
In other words, if the real issues forcing thousands to live in precarious and underpaid conditions are to be solved, the global paradigm for approaching poverty and powerlessness needs to learn from movements like the Day-Waged Labor Movement and its leader, Muhammad Snayd.
To listen to the full conversation, click here:
