At a Glance
Fez and the Workers' World
Boubker Kadiri was born in 1921 in Fez — but not in the medina's world of the merchant notable families that produced most of the Fez-origin figures in the Moroccan independence movement. He came from the working-class world of the old city — the world of the artisans, the craftsmen, the wage workers in the traditional industries and the newer European-owned enterprises that the protectorate's economic development had created. This origin was significant not only for the specific working-class experience it gave him but for the specific perspective on Moroccan nationalism it produced: a perspective that connected the abstract claim of national sovereignty to the concrete daily experience of wage discrimination, workplace hierarchy, and the specific forms of economic exploitation that the colonial system imposed on Moroccan workers at the most immediate level of their daily lives.
The Fez working-class world of the 1920s and 1930s was the world of the transition between the traditional artisan economy of the medina — the weavers, the tanners, the metalworkers, the leatherworkers whose crafts had sustained Moroccan urban life for centuries — and the newer industrial economy that the protectorate was building alongside and partly at the expense of the traditional sector. Moroccan artisans were experiencing the specific economic pressure of competition from European manufactured goods that the protectorate's economic framework privileged, and Moroccan workers in the newer European enterprises were experiencing the wage discrimination and the workplace hierarchies that colonial labour systems consistently imposed. Kadiri grew up in this environment of economic pressure and workplace injustice, and his subsequent political career was the expression of the conviction that this economic injustice was inseparable from the political injustice of colonial rule.
The Colonial Labour System and Its Contradictions
The French protectorate's labour system was one of the most visible expressions of colonial inequality in Moroccan daily life. European workers in Morocco were paid at rates significantly higher than Moroccan workers doing equivalent work; they occupied the supervisory and skilled positions while Moroccan workers filled the unskilled and semi-skilled roles; they had access to housing, social services, and legal protections that Moroccan workers were denied or received in attenuated form; and they could participate in the French metropolitan trade union movement's full organisational framework while Moroccan workers' participation in that framework was structurally limited by the colonial relationship.
This system was not only unjust in the obvious sense that it discriminated by race and nationality; it was also politically revealing in that it made the connection between colonial domination and economic exploitation immediately visible and immediately personal to every Moroccan worker who experienced the wage gap, the blocked promotion, or the unequal workplace condition. The labour movement's political potential — its capacity to connect workplace grievance to the broader political demand for independence — derived from this connection: Moroccan workers who experienced colonial labour discrimination were, through that experience, being given a material argument for national independence that complemented the intellectual arguments of the nationalist movement's theorists.
Building Towards the UMT: The Organiser's Patient Work
The Union Marocaine du Travail that Kadiri helped to found in 1955 was not built in a day. It was the product of years of patient organisational work — the slow building of relationships with Moroccan workers in different industries and different cities, the development of the organisational infrastructure of workplace committees and sectoral federations and regional structures that a genuinely national trade union federation required, and the navigation of the specific challenges that the French protectorate's restrictions on independent Moroccan labour organisation created.
The organisational work was dangerous as well as patient. The protectorate administration was hostile to specifically Moroccan trade union organisation precisely because it understood the connection between Moroccan labour organisation and Moroccan nationalist politics — and the connection was real, as the UMT's subsequent political alignment with the independence movement demonstrated. Nationalist labour organisers like Kadiri operated in the knowledge that their work was being monitored, that specific acts of organisation could result in arrest, and that the specific networks they were building were known to the protectorate's intelligence services even when the administration chose not to act on that knowledge immediately.
1955: The UMT and the Moment of Independence
The founding of the Union Marocaine du Travail in 1955 — in the specific political moment of the final campaign for Moroccan independence, when the combination of the armed resistance in the countryside, the popular mobilisation around the exiled Sultan's return, and the specific diplomatic pressure on France had created the conditions in which independence was becoming inevitable — was both a labour movement achievement and a political act. The UMT's founding demonstrated that Moroccan workers had built the organisational capacity for an independent Moroccan trade union movement; it gave the independence campaign a working-class organisational dimension that it had previously lacked in formal institutional terms; and it created the institutional framework within which Moroccan labour politics would develop after independence.
The specific character of the UMT — its explicit connection to the Istiqlal's independence politics while maintaining its formal organisational independence, its commitment to representing Moroccan workers' interests as Moroccan workers rather than as members of a metropolitan French working class, its ambition to build a genuinely national federation that could speak for workers across the different industries and regions of Morocco — reflected the specific political vision that Kadiri and the other UMT founders brought to the labour movement. It was not simply an industrial relations organisation but a vehicle of the independence movement's social dimension — the expression of the conviction that Moroccan independence had to mean economic dignity for Moroccan workers as well as political sovereignty for the Moroccan state.
Post-Independence: The Labour Movement's New Challenges
The independence that Morocco achieved in 1956 created new challenges for the UMT and for Kadiri's conception of what the labour movement was for. The organisation had been built for a specific political purpose — to connect Moroccan workers to the independence movement and to use the labour movement's capacity for economic pressure as an instrument of the anti-colonial campaign. With independence achieved, the question of the UMT's role in independent Morocco was a question that required a new answer: what should the relationship between the UMT and the independent Moroccan state be? What should its relationship with the Istiqlal be, now that the Istiqlal was a governing party rather than an opposition movement? How should it balance its role as a workers' organisation — representing workers' interests against employers, including the state as employer — with its historical connection to the nationalist movement that had built the independent state?
These questions did not have simple answers, and the post-independence history of the UMT — the tensions with the palace that Hassan II's consolidation of power created, the relationship with the Istiqlal through the period of that party's marginalisation, the management of the UMT's institutional independence in a political environment that was consistently hostile to genuinely independent civil society organisations — was a history of navigating these tensions with varying degrees of success. Kadiri's continuing role in the UMT's leadership through the early post-independence period contributed to the organisation's capacity to maintain its institutional presence through these challenges, and the UMT's survival as an independent labour federation — imperfect and constrained but surviving — was partly the product of the specific organisational culture that the founding generation had built.
Legacy: The Working-Class Dimension of Independence
Boubker Kadiri's legacy is the legacy of the organiser who gave the independence movement its working-class dimension — who built the institutional bridge between the nationalist politics of the educated leadership and the workplace experience of the majority of Moroccan workers, and who created in the UMT the organisational vehicle through which the labour movement's capacity for collective action could be deployed in the service of independence. The UMT's founding was one of the most significant institutional achievements of the independence period, and Kadiri's contribution to that founding was the contribution of the labour organiser who understood both what the labour movement was for and why the independence movement needed it.
The Moroccan labour movement that exists today — the UMT and its successors and competitors, the collective bargaining institutions and the labour law framework and the workplace representation structures that independent Morocco has developed — stands on the foundations that Kadiri and the UMT's founding generation built. That the working-class dimension of Moroccan independence has received less historical attention than the intellectual and diplomatic dimensions reflects the historical record's general preference for the dramatic and the individual over the institutional and the collective — but it does not reflect the relative importance of the different contributions to the independence that Morocco achieved in 1956 and to the kind of independent society that independence was supposed to create.