This week, my first full week of work with the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail, was wonderful and enriching. It was the start of the séance unique in Tunisia, a period in July and August when the weather is so hot that it becomes all but impossible to do anything, which means that the workdays were a little bit shorter, between roughly 8:30 A.M. to 1 or 1:30 PM. 

I did lots of reading this week, making my way through several reports that the UGTT has published over the past few years. Their department of studies is incredible, and conducts thorough and intensive on-the-ground research to investigate a question or assess a pertinent problem affecting the conditions of work in the country. The first one that I finished this past week (and I’m going slowly, as the translation process is slow but rewarding) focused on the informal work sector and how it uniquely affects women in Tunisia. The second report that I am yet to finish is about the social and solidarity economy. Both of the reports have placed unique emphasis on the agricultural and fishing industries, which compose a large portion of the Tunisian workforce. 

The first study on women performing contractual, non-permanent work discussed how structural factors in our society, like patriarchal family organization and employers seeking profit incentives at any human cost, make women workers especially precarious. As you can imagine, women who are uniquely tasked with watching their children, picking them up from daycare or school, or caring for family members are much less likely to be able to hold down a continuous job with fixed hours, thereby missing out on permanent employment contracts and access to healthcare, retirement, and salary benefits. For migrants, single mothers, and illiterate women in particular, for women who are forced into dangerous and back-breaking working conditions to survive, the informal sector offers at least some respite from drowning. As a result, despite women making up a smaller part of the workforce than men, they have higher proportional rates of unemployment and participation in the informal sector. Additionally, many employers exploit accusations that their female employees might become pregnant or take maternity leave as a way to cheat them out of permanent contracts. 

In addition to research inquiries, I had the chance to speak with and learn from many syndicalists and union leaders in the UGTT, including (forgive the bad translations) in the Department of the Social and Solidarity Economy, the Department of Youth and Women, the Department of Migration, as well as a lead organizer with the Union Federation for Information and Communication Technologies. I learned so, so many things from these conversations, but a general observation was just how brilliant and passionate each of the organizers was about their specific domain. 

I greatly enjoyed learning more about the principles of the social and solidarity economy, building upon the information I learned in the conference last Saturday on the same theme. The UGTT has played a critical role in the institutionalization of these principles in Tunisia, in collaboration with the International Labor Organization and many other global NGOs fighting for dignity in work and a recognition of the humanity of workers. A key project of the Department of the Social and Solidarity Economy is to support agricultural cooperatives, especially of women workers, who have needed support with marketing, communication, and promotional services so that they are able to widely distribute their products on the national marketplace. 

Additionally, Tunisia is the second country after France to have a factory owned collectively by its workers, a project that the UGTT has helped champion. However, what I had literally no idea about was how common collectives are across the world. The research of the UGTT has shown that there are roughly 20 million workers across the world who participate in some sort of collective ownership structure, aligning with the values of the social and solidarity economy. Even in the United States, for instance, over two million workers are involved in some sort of cooperative, with over 370,000 cooperatives in the industrial sector and annual revenues of roughly $650 billion. 

In this next week, I hope to be more proactive about offering to help my supervisors with tasks and assignments, especially as we are in the midst of planning for a half-day conference about women working in the agricultural sector and how they are uniquely affected by climate change. I also aim to take more initiative in reaching out to people who have given me their contact information and setting up formal occasions to speak to those whom I have met in passing so that I have a chance to ask them questions about their experiences and how the workers they organize alongside have been affected by new technologies.

Finally, I want to continue to ask questions when I have them, to say hello to people that I haven’t met before, and just more generally be a bit more outgoing than I have in the past—I feel so much more comfortable now, having been at the UGTT for two weeks at this point, and am so grateful for how warm and welcoming every single person has been.