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Paper short abstract

This paper unpacks how authoritarian State-led industrialisation and corporate strategies in the automotive industry in Tangier, Morocco are shaping a precarious industrial workforce while simultaneously shaping new subjectivities and possibilities for labour activism beyond union activity.

Paper long abstract

Based on four months of fieldwork in Tangier, Morocco, this paper explores how the State-led industrialisation process in the city and region since the arrival of a major European automobile manufacturer and the development of its local ecosystem of suppliers has brought about a growing industrial workforce at Europe’s doorstep.

It will analyse how the entanglement of State and corporate strategies ensures continuous labour supply for the growing labour-intensive automotive sector as well as the ongoing weakness of labour contestation through a variety of recruitment and managerial practices aimed at differentiating and hierarchising workers as well as the construction of isolated special economic zones and de facto bans on trade unions. This strategy is paralleled by the acceptance of chosen unions in some factories, often as a means to integrate and discipline workers in the aftermath of labour conflicts.

Finally, I will reflect on how this rapid industrialisation process and concomitant corporate strategies have reshaped local social and labour relations and ask in what ways it has led to the emergence of new worker subjectivities, thereby posing major challenges for union activity but opening new avenues for worker resistance and solidarity networks in and outside of factories at a rising hub of the European automotive industry’s supply chain.