Every year, the workers of the world celebrate on this day (the first of May), their International Day, and as usual, the memory will pass on the Yemeni workers while they have been living in difficult conditions due to the state of conflict, division, and the fragility of their union incubators.
Historically, before Yemeni workers had unions to defend their rights in a city like Aden seven decades ago, many of them were devoured by the seas, ship boilers, coal fumes and construction scaffolding in Asia, Africa, Europe and America.
They dispersed in the regions in search of a source of income to work in difficult and harsh professions after their country turned into an isolated and expelling geography at the same time, due to the policies of closure, tyranny and impoverishment pursued by the Imamate regime, the colonial regime and the feudal lords in the protectorates. As a result, many young people were forced to travel by sea and work in occupations that commensurate with their limited experience and poor education, without legal protection to protect them from the greed of employers, who found in the low wages of workers in view of the lack of unions to defend them, an opportunity to exploit them.
In the mid-fifties, and at the height of the national tide, the work of trade unions in Aden became active against the discriminatory policies pursued by the colonial regime, which sided with monopolistic companies owned or run by foreigners, including refineries and the port, at the expense of workers. Thus, the unions were able, through a series of strikes, to snatch some vital gains for its members.
The workers' trade union movement was born out of the bowels of the political and national drive and became part of it. With its accumulated experience, it became part of the transformations heralded by the Yemeni revolution since the beginning of the sixties, and they were the most obvious model in the limited attempt to transition from the closed rural peasant state to the civil state with its commercial and productive openings despite their limitations.
And when the left movement presented its model of power in southern Yemen since independence in late November 1967 until the early 1990s, it used labor slogans in its political discourse, which for two decades preached the process of transformation that this class would lead with its dictatorial tendency. However, various tests dispelled this illusion, brought from the bottom of books and the surpluses of ideology. On top of which are the complexities of tribal structures and the nature of peasant relations in all southern regions with the exception of Aden, which also later lived in a state of harsh ruralism with the waves of political migration of fighters and supporters of the new regime to it starting in the early seventies.
In the north of Yemen, the September Revolution opened the door wide for the moves of modernization in a society just emerging from the darkness of centuries. Many new commercial and industrial sectors arose, in which workers became part of its continuity and development in the following two decades. As a result of the political transformations, some trade unions were formed in factories and companies. However, the lack of awareness and the political manipulation of the trade unions’ stances in favor of the successive authorities, with the involvement of the employers, played a key role that hindered their syndicates' development and recovery.
What should also not be forgotten is the contribution of Yemeni workers to building the infrastructure of most of the neighboring countries with the oil boom phase during the seventies and eighties, and was subsequently met with disappointing ingratitude and denial, when they turned - from the point of view of the authorities in those countries - into surplus and unwanted labor starting in the early 1990s, and their return home during the second Gulf War constituted a state of pressure on the fragile economy of the nascent state, the "Republic of Yemen".
The successive political crises, which culminated in the absurd eight-year war, affected all pillars of civil life, including trade union formations. Workers became easy prey for employers, who took advantage of the state of chaos, corruption, and division to practice the worst forms of persecution against workers, including layoffs, confiscation of rights, refusal to pay insurance premiums to insurance institutions and companies, and dropping care rights.
Throughout this file, Khuyut will allow its readers to read and learn more about the conditions of this segment, which was once a witness to transformation, despite its limitations, while today it has become stuck in its disappointments and isolation.
