MER Article Worker Protest in the Age of Ahmadinejad In June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unexpectedly won the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran, after an intense campaign in which he exerted great effort to present himself as the defender of the poor and the working class. These classes, badly hurt by neo-liberal economic policies in the period Mohammad Maljoo • 12 min read
MER Article Storming the Fences "'Black locusts' are taking over Morocco!" So ran the September 12, 2005 headline of al-Shamal, an Arabic-language Tangier newspaper, describing the forays of masses of in-transit sub-Saharan Africans trying to scale the security fences separating Morocco from the Spanish-ruled enclaves of Ceuta and Elie Goldschmidt • 17 min read
MER Article The Other Casualties of War in Iraq Labor practices in Iraq are under scrutiny, as contractors hire poor non-Iraqis to work low-wage jobs in a deadly environment. Migrant workers are employed through complex layers of companies working in Iraq. At the top of the pyramid is the US government, which assigned over $24 billion in contract Rebecca Milligan • 4 min read
MER Article "Model Employees" Twenty-two year old Leela made a promise to her family in Sri Lanka: she would earn enough money working abroad as a maid or a nanny to build a new house back home. Living thousands of miles from her husband and young son would be difficult, but Leela thought she would be able to send them money whi Monica Smith • 8 min read
MER Article Of Specters and Disciplined Commodities “Lebanon was built with Syrian muscles,” declared an elderly Lebanese in the early 1990s. He was referring to the hundreds of thousands of semi- and unskilled Syrians who have worked in Lebanon on a temporary basis in construction, agriculture, manufacturing and services since the mid-twentieth cent John Chalcraft • 15 min read
MER Article The "Street" and the Politics of Dissent in the Arab World In the tense weeks between the September 11 attacks and the first US bombing raids over Afghanistan, and continuing until the fall of the Taliban, commentators raised serious concerns about what the Wall Street Journal later called the "irrational Arab street." [1] If the US attacked a Muslim Asef Bayat • 18 min read
MER Article Financing Terrorism or Survival? Armed with a wide range of new legislative powers, in the months following September 11 the Bush administration stepped up action on the “second front” of its war on terrorism. The USA Patriot Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act provide Federal officials with the authority to freeze assets Khalid Mustafa Medani • 17 min read
MER Article Economic Reform in Egypt Texts Reviewed Ray Bush, Economic Crisis and the Politics of Reform in Egypt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). Nicholas S. Hopkins and Kirsten Westergaard, eds. Directions of Change in Rural Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998). Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Labor and the State i Agnieszska Paczynska • 5 min read
MER Article Risking the Strait Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man Gregory White • 12 min read
MER Article Stifling Democracy Within Palestinian Unions In well-furbished offices overlooking downtown Nablus, Shahir Sa'd, General Secretary of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) sells his vision of the post-Oslo labor movement. "With the return of the Palestinian Authority (PA) we could concentrate on workers' issues, rather tha Nina Sovich • 6 min read
MER Article Migrant Women in Waged Domestic Work in Turkey “If we were to continuously work until 5 o’clock as hard as the employer wants, we would not be able to get to work the next day. No human being can work as much as that.” -- Domestic Worker Hayat Kabasakal, Işik Urla Zeytinoğlu, Ömür Tımurcanday Özmen, Alev Ergenç Katrınlı • 4 min read
MER Article A Modern-Day "Slave Trade" In what can be termed a modern-day slave trade, Sri Lankan women arrive in Lebanon only to find themselves abused, imprisoned, raped, hungry, defenseless and alone. Siriani P., 27, came to Beirut in a desperate attempt to save her family from a life of poverty. Just ten months later, however, she gr Reem Haddad • 7 min read
