Touraj Atabaki, Elisabetta Bini, and Kaveh Ehsani, eds., Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry (Palgrave Macmillan 2018)., 2018
Based on MA thesis completed at Georgetown University's MA program in Arab Studies in May 2014.
... more Based on MA thesis completed at Georgetown University's MA program in Arab Studies in May 2014.
This essay examines the politics of the technical and anti-colonial nationalism in the labor history of the Trans-Arabian pipeline, or Tapline, in Lebanon. It covers the period between 1950, when Tapline was completed, and 1963–1964, when the company’s Lebanese workforce unionized and participated in a successful nationwide strike. After reviewing the purposes Tapline was built to serve, this essay examines the technical systems that enabled and regulated the flow of oil through the pipeline and the managerial strategy Tapline pursued to prevent worker mobilization that could disrupt those systems. It then shows how Tapline’s Lebanese employees unionized, secured coordinated control over the flow of oil through the pipeline, and used their resulting power to contest the terms of their labor. In doing so, this essay aims to illustrate the unpredictable ways in which technology distributes agency, and the complex and seemingly contradictory ways in which labor activism engages with the managerial strategies it opposes.
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This paper examines a 1969 infrastructure-sabotage campaign by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as reported in the pages of its weekly newspaper, al-Hadaf. While academic and policy discourse conceptualises sabotage in a way that emphasises its disruptive effects and sometimes obscures the positive political ends toward which acts of sabotage are directed, the PFLP conceptualised sabotage as a practice of revealing the political and economic relations that infrastructures sustain by disrupting them and marking progress toward an alternative political-economic order. For the PFLP, sabotage constituted a kind of concrete critique, a communicative act that conveys a theoretical analysis of processes of extraction, exploitation, and dispossession by physically interrupting them.
This essay examines the politics of the technical and anti-colonial nationalism in the labor history of the Trans-Arabian pipeline, or Tapline, in Lebanon. It covers the period between 1950, when Tapline was completed, and 1963–1964, when the company’s Lebanese workforce unionized and participated in a successful nationwide strike. After reviewing the purposes Tapline was built to serve, this essay examines the technical systems that enabled and regulated the flow of oil through the pipeline and the managerial strategy Tapline pursued to prevent worker mobilization that could disrupt those systems. It then shows how Tapline’s Lebanese employees unionized, secured coordinated control over the flow of oil through the pipeline, and used their resulting power to contest the terms of their labor. In doing so, this essay aims to illustrate the unpredictable ways in which technology distributes agency, and the complex and seemingly contradictory ways in which labor activism engages with the managerial strategies it opposes.
This paper examines a 1969 infrastructure-sabotage campaign by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as reported in the pages of its weekly newspaper, al-Hadaf. While academic and policy discourse conceptualises sabotage in a way that emphasises its disruptive effects and sometimes obscures the positive political ends toward which acts of sabotage are directed, the PFLP conceptualised sabotage as a practice of revealing the political and economic relations that infrastructures sustain by disrupting them and marking progress toward an alternative political-economic order. For the PFLP, sabotage constituted a kind of concrete critique, a communicative act that conveys a theoretical analysis of processes of extraction, exploitation, and dispossession by physically interrupting them.
This essay examines the politics of the technical and anti-colonial nationalism in the labor history of the Trans-Arabian pipeline, or Tapline, in Lebanon. It covers the period between 1950, when Tapline was completed, and 1963–1964, when the company’s Lebanese workforce unionized and participated in a successful nationwide strike. After reviewing the purposes Tapline was built to serve, this essay examines the technical systems that enabled and regulated the flow of oil through the pipeline and the managerial strategy Tapline pursued to prevent worker mobilization that could disrupt those systems. It then shows how Tapline’s Lebanese employees unionized, secured coordinated control over the flow of oil through the pipeline, and used their resulting power to contest the terms of their labor. In doing so, this essay aims to illustrate the unpredictable ways in which technology distributes agency, and the complex and seemingly contradictory ways in which labor activism engages with the managerial strategies it opposes.