Tunisian Women Workers: A Surge in Workplace Accidents

By Yosra Blali

A tragic workplace accident struck a food-processing factory in the Ben Arous region near Tunis, where 19-year-old Samar lost her life due to negligence and the absence of basic safety measures.

On what began as an ordinary morning, Samar was checking the freight elevator to see if it carried a load. But the moment she leaned her head inside, the elevator suddenly dropped, decapitating her in a horrifying scene that left the women workers traumatized, a memory they have yet to recover from.

The workers themselves confirmed that they had repeatedly warned factory management about the danger posed by the elevator after several previous incidents, but their voices went unheard.

Samar’s tragedy is not an exception; it mirrors a grim reality where such disasters recur under suffocating administrative silence. The absence of workplace safety has become a nightmare haunting women workers in Tunisian factories, robbing them of their simple hope for a dignified life. The same terror stalks agricultural women laborers who board the infamous “death trucks” every morning, carrying their shrouds metaphorically on their backs, telling themselves each evening: “Thank God… fate has allowed us one more night.”

Tunisia’s economic reality, especially in the interior and southern regions, shows that labor structures remain governed by gendered hierarchies that reproduce men’s dominance in the spaces of production and the market. Work, in this context, is not merely an economic activity but an extension of a patriarchal social order that situates women within the logic of “dependence,” not “autonomy.”

In its neoliberal form, Tunisian capitalism recycles this order by transforming women’s precarity into an economic resource. It is capitalism draped in patriarchal features, reshaping women’s bodies into a low-cost labor force and justifying their exploitation under the guise of empowerment and economic integration, all while excluding them from decision-making roles and confining them to the margins of production.

“We Are Just a Number”: A Testimony From Inside an Electrical Machinery Factory

In an exhausted voice, Souad (a pseudonym), a worker in an electronic components factory, recounts her story to Sharika Wa Laken.
“I was working on a machine known as the ‘cable machine’. I noticed it was consuming an unusually large amount of insulation material, so I alerted the supervisors that it was malfunctioning and could cause harm. But no one listened.”

Two weeks after Souad repeatedly notified both supervisors and management about the machine’s technical problems, the machine suddenly malfunctioned. Instead of pulling the cable, it caught her apron and wrist. The tendons in her shoulder tore, and she collapsed in pain, crying. The factory management did nothing. Instead of rushing her to safety, they yelled at her, threatened her job if she spoke about the malfunction, and forced her to sign a document absolving the factory of any responsibility toward her.

Souad went alone to the hospital. What followed was a long journey of delays and evasion between management and the social security office, until she was shocked to learn that her sick leave days would not be counted because she did not submit the medical certificate within the required time frame. Since she works under an open-ended contract, she is not registered in the National Social Security Fund and does not benefit from health insurance unless the employer covers her medical expenses, which, in her case, they refused to do.

“In the factory, we are not human. They call us and refer to us by numbers. As if we were machines for production and quick profit.”
With these words, Souad summed up the suffering of women in factories. In the absence of workplace safety, the marginalization of women workers’ rights, and the reduction of their identities to numbers, their humanity fades the moment they step through the factory gates, where they become nothing more than a source of rapid profit.

Souad works seven hours a day for 3,200 millimes (about one US dollar) per hour, around 21 dinars (7 USD) a day, earning between 600 dinars (204 USD) and sometimes as little as 500 dinars (170 USD) per month after deductions.

“I work all day, my head bent, my shoulders tense, and in the end what I earn isn’t even enough to cover household expenses.”
With these words, Souad concluded her testimony. In her thirties, she tries her best to help her husband with household expenses and provide for their only daughter, yet she cannot hide her fear of an uncertain future inside a factory that neither ensures women’s safety nor respects their dignity, and that can discard them at any moment due to the nature of the open-ended contract.

We contacted the administrative officer at the factory to understand the reasons behind the negligence and lack of safety revealed in Souad’s case. She reduced the entire conversation to a single statement: that she would “open an investigation into the number of malfunctioning machines,” offering no acknowledgement of Souad’s medical condition nor admitting that what happened was a workplace accident.

Souad’s case drew our attention to a sector considered among the harshest in factory work. Tunisia’s textile industry, especially in coastal regions such as Monastir and Soussa, relies almost entirely on women’s labor. Its working conditions are no better than those in food-processing or electronics factories; in fact, they are described as worse. The sector depends on tasks like assembly and manual sewing, physically exhausting, repetitive jobs that lack even basic safety equipment, according to a 2020 Fair Wear Foundation report. This amounts to double, and often triple, exploitation of women.

The same report notes that around 80% of workers in the global garment sector are women, and that in Tunisia, women make up about 85% of textile factory employees. Reports from the International Labor Organization record a gender wage gap of up to 19%, while World Bank data from 2019 shows that women’s labor force participation does not exceed 26.6%, and their unemployment rate reaches 22%, nearly double that of men.

Women working in textile and food factories represent one of the clearest intersections of class and gender. Although these factories are often portrayed as symbols of women’s liberation from unemployment and poverty, they in reality reproduce the logic of dual exploitation: Employers benefit from women’s weak class position, and patriarchal culture legitimizes their subordination by framing them as “helping” the family rather than supporting it independently

This dynamic reflects what French sociologist and feminist Christine Delphy calls “extended domestic labor”, where the logic of service and obedience is reproduced within the sphere of production. The situation can also be interpreted through the perspectives of feminist theorists Angela Davis and Silvia Federici, who link capitalism to the appropriation of the woman body. Under this system, the woman worker’s body is treated as a production machine, not a human subject, evaluated by hours worked and endurance, not by dignity or justice.

From Iron to Soil: Women Agricultural Workers… Another Kind of Pain

In Tunisia’s rural regions, exploitation takes on an even harsher form. Women agricultural laborers are subjected to a dual system of exclusion: class-based and geographic. They neither own land nor capital, and their role is reduced to seasonal labor for meager wages that do not reflect the intensity of their physical effort or the risks of their daily commute.

What the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence” becomes painfully clear here, not in its brutality, but in how normalized it is. Local customs legitimize women’s subjugation by treating strenuous labor as merely “helping the family.”

From an intersectional feminist perspective, gender, class, and rural marginalization intersect to create a form of modern-day servitude that sustains both patriarchal and capitalist systems. The Tunisian agricultural woman worker is not just a laborer, she embodies a double marginalization: woman/girl, rural, and poor.

“Women agricultural workers are concentrated mainly in rural areas such as Siliana, Kairouan, Sidi Bouzid, Jendouba, Kasserine, and Jebniana. Their wages range between 15 and 25 dinars a day (5 to 8 USD), depending on the season, under a mediation system where the driver and intermediary, known as “electrician”, deduct part of their wages in exchange for transporting them to the fields,” explains Rahma Al-Aidoudi, head of the economic and social affairs division at the Aswat Nissa association. She describes the reality of agricultural workers as “one of the harshest faces of marginalization in Tunisia.”

She adds that most of these women work without contracts and without social coverage, leaving them with no protection in case of an accident.

As for working conditions, they are “inhumanly harsh”: women labor under scorching heat or freezing cold without protective gear, often without drinking water or sanitary facilities. Their transportation consists of cargo trucks or livestock vehicles repurposed to carry women due to the absence of alternatives, trucks that have claimed the lives of dozens, earning the name “death trucks.” According to monitoring by Aswat Nissa, in 2024 alone there were 128 injuries and 5 deaths caused by these vehicles.

Tunisian law guarantees workers’ rights and sets a minimum agricultural wage of 16.5 dinars per day (about 5.5 USD), yet most women do not receive that amount. This gap between text and implementation reflects the structural economic and social fragility surrounding women workers, whether in factories or in fields.

In factories, women face the absence of workplace safety, marginalization, and neglect. In the fields, they face the lack of legal protection and the risk of death during transportation. In both cases, the economic system reduces their bodies to numbers, recorded in production logs or accident reports.

Between the iron of the factory and the soil of the fields stretches a single thread of struggle and resistance woven by Tunisian working women. They measure their day in back pain, in fear of falling, crashing, or slipping from a truck.

And yet they continue to work, not because they do not fear death, but because the life awaiting them on the other side of unemployment is even harsher. They are the pillars of the invisible economy, the backbone of entire households, and voices drowned out by industrial noise and roaring engines, but still able, even in a faint whisper, to say: We are not just numbers, or to shout, “We will not give up our rights, and we are holding on to them” as heard in the agricultural workers’ mobilization last May.

The comparison between factory workers and agricultural laborers reveals that Tunisia’s economic system does more than divide labor according to skill or market demands, it actively reproduces gender hierarchies at the heart of production. Both large industrial enterprises and agricultural fields operate within what British sociologist Sylvia Walby describes as patriarchal capitalism: a system that combines male authority within the household and capitalist exploitation in the market.

Low wages, insecure employment, and the absence of social recognition are tools used to maintain this dominance. In this way, women’s labor becomes an invisible economy that sustains capitalist growth without granting its contributors recognition or power. The outcome is the continuous reproduction of a cycle of domination, one that feeds on women’s vulnerability to keep the patriarchal system aligned with market interests, ensuring that roles remain trapped in frameworks of inequality and injustice.

By: Yosra Blali