"Real unions": Arab organized labor in British Palestine.

• Author: Power, Jane
• Position: 1946

In Palestine, as in the rest of the world, the end of World War II brought hard times to workers; Palestinian Arabs, like workers elsewhere, reacted vigorously to their new situation. As the prosperity of wartime production vanished and veterans swelled the workforce, unemployment and a falling real wage roused workers to protest. Massive strikes from Bombay to Seattle to Lagos - and in Palestine - registered workers' frustration.

In 1946, then, Palestinian Arab workers and their unions were alive to the same postwar pressures and took up the same means of resistance as counterparts both in other colonized countries and in the United States. Yet, barely two decades earlier, few Palestinian Arabs had jobs in which a union would be useful. This article contends that, once engaged in mass industrial employment, Palestinian Arabs quickly developed unions that operated well within the range of commonly accepted union activities and structures. They established, that is, mass organizations that defended their on-the-job interests vis-a-vis employers and pressed the government to protect their class interests. These unions, like others, generally grew stronger or weaker with the demand for labor. They governed themselves, more or less democratically. They formed shifting alliances, based on members' and leaders' perceptions of their interests, with government bodies, political and civil interest groups, and one another.

The Arab workers built these very ordinary unions despite extreme abnormalities in their economic and political situation. First of all, the British occupation of Palestine put Arab workers in the same abnormal position as workers in any other Western colony. Typically, Western-owned enterprises employed Western managers, supervisors, and technicians, giving them more money and more respect than the mass of mostly unskilled indigenous workers. Colonized workers resented the unfairness of management and the frequent arrogance of their European fellow employees. They also saw those employees form unions which could wrest better pay and working conditions from the employers. Such unions often furthered the interests of the expatriate employees at the expense of the local. Colonized workers thus set out to form unions of their own.(1)

Colonial officials sometimes sought to discredit unions of colonized workers by characterizing them as mere nationalist front organizations. Colonized workers did often act on interests specific to their nation rather than those they shared with workers of different nationality. They did not join foreign co-workers in actions that might not benefit, and could harm, them. They also often "collaborated" with compatriot non-worker politicians to further national interests. No particular choice between class and national interests, however, is per se indicative of some essential union identity. Colonized workers who ignored international solidarity or cooperated with selected non-workers were behaving no differently than the foreign employees of the same firm. In Western Europe and North America, too - for example, in Europe at the outbreak of World War I - workers based similar choices on national considerations.(2)

Palestinian Arab workers under British rule shared the situation, and the reactions, of workers in other colonized economies, but more particularly of a special group of those workers. Palestine was among the colonies where Westerners did not simply rule; they settled. This situation created special conditions for indigenous workers: they had to deal with foreign co-workers and employers not just as individual expatriates, but as members of an immigrant community that competed with their own for jobs and markets. Their unions therefore defended workers' national interests against settler agencies as well as colonial authorities. The Palestinian Arab unions matched the pattern not only of unions in general, but specifically of unions in settler colonial economies.

Scholars did not immediately recognize the authenticity of the Palestinian Arabs' unions. Until the 1980s, few historians of Palestine under the British Mandate mentioned the Arab labor unions; almost without exception, those few referred to the Arab unions as small and weak, commonly fronts for notable factions, and often based on clan ties.(3) Several factors may have fed this misperception. Scholars examining Mandate Palestine concentrated their attention on diplomacy and politics. Their sources were unlikely to discuss the independent activities of workers or unions; the rare scholarly discussion of class focused on the peasantry. Scholars also may have held the Arab unions to a standard of static, full-blown unionism that labor historians did not apply to Western workers in similar transition from pre-capitalist tradition to disciplined militance. Some historians, in addition, may have taken as a standard the powerful Histadrut conglomerate established by the Jewish community of Palestine. This standard was inappropriate: the Histadrut was not a "real union," but an amalgam of trade union, entrepreneur, political party, and public agency.

In recent years, historians have examined economic and social aspects of the Mandate, but still without taking Arab unions seriously. Exceptions are Zachary Lockman, who has examined the effect of Arab unions on the ideology and activities of their Jewish counterparts, and Issa Khalaf, who has noted the growing influence of individual union leaders in Palestinian Arab political circles. These scholars acknowledge the legitimacy of the Arab unions, but it is peripheral to their major concerns.(4)

The history of the Palestinian Arab unions merits more concentrated attention, for its significance extends beyond its interest as an institutional chronicle. The development of any Western-type institution outside the West is not a mere sign of "progress" (or decline) toward Westernization. It sometimes demonstrates strategic flexibility in a people whom Westerners have judged too slow to give up traditional ways. It can, for instance, show that Palestinian Arabs, confronted by a new situation - in this case, the large capitalist workplace - were ready to adopt a relevant and useful response even though it was of alien origin.

This article first outlines Arab workers' development of unions, then describes the two large federations of the 1940s at their point of fullest maturity. Although their colonized status presented them with serious obstacles, the Arab unions of British Palestine were not, I argue, exceptions to some general rule of union development. Rather, they differed from (and resembled) the unions of various countries in various ways at various times - as they did one another.

THE LIFE HISTORY OF PALESTINIAN ARAB UNIONS, 1921-1947

For most of the period between the early British mandate and the Second World War, Palestine's Arab unions really were small and weak - and for good reason. Typically, a union develops when wage workers concentrated in a large workplace recognize common interests and grievances and decide to act on these in common. Nineteenth-century workers in Western Europe and North America developed the first unions; as other countries industrialized, their workers commonly heard about and adopted that form of response. Until the British occupation, Palestine had no industries that drew together large, cosmopolitan workforces. Arab workers did not need - or hear about - unions.

When the British invasion of Palestine in World War I began to change that situation, Arab workers were quick to organize. The new rulers conscripted railroad workers from Egypt, where transport unions were already strong. After the war, Jewish immigrants entered railroad work, especially in the big Haifa maintenance shops, bringing the European union tradition. Palestinian Arabs coming into railroad work put their co-workers' experience to use. As early as 1921, they began to seek a binational union with their Jewish shopmates. When Histadrut opposition blocked creation of a nonpolitical (non-Zionist) union, the Haifa Arab railroad workers in 1925 formed the first - and longest-lived - Arab union in Palestine, the Palestine Arab Workers Society (PAWS).(5)

The First Wave of Arab Unions, 1925-1940

For nearly a decade, PAWS remained Palestine's only sizable and durable union: growing competition for jobs left no leverage for labor organizations. Arab employment was artificially restricted: British economic regulations hurt Arab employers, while Zionist agencies, in particular the Histadrut, pressed Jewish employers to hire only Jews. At the same time, Arab rural migration and Jewish immigration rendered the workforce, in effect, limitless.(6)

Despite their lack of power, urban Arab workers persistently organized. They tested various forms, including benevolent associations, a religious-based (Orthodox Christian) workers' society, and employer-employee groups like the Jerusalem Car Owners and Drivers or the Jaffa Boatmen's Association. They also held occasionally successful strikes, usually over wages, hours, or working conditions, and (often in connection with strikes) formed ephemeral unions.

In January 1930, a nationwide workers' conference brought together the strands in the Palestinian Arab labor movement as it then existed. The organizers were Arab unionists, members of the binational Palestine Communist Party and of the strongly nationalist PAWS. Most of the sixty-one participants were elected by their co-workers; a handful were intellectuals; and one was a village notable. Both Communists and notables sought to influence the delegates as they acted on concerns about the workplace, public policy, and national liberation. Rejecting a notable-inspired call for a fourteen-hour workday to "build up the national economy," delegates instead adopted a...