Reflections on the 2025 ITUC Global Rights Index – Developing Economics

The International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) 2025 Global Rights Index was released on 2 June. The report presents a sobering picture of escalating violations of workers’ rights globally. Based on data from 151 countries, the Index reports that 87% of countries violated the right to strike, 80% restricted collective bargaining, and over 70% impeded union registration or denied access to justice. These trends, the report argues, reflect a “coup against democracy”—an ongoing assault on core labour rights driven by repressive governments, emboldened corporations, and a broader authoritarian and conflict-ridden global capitalism.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region once again emerges as the most repressive in the Index (with an overall score of 4.68; a score of 5 indicates no guarantee of rights), with all countries in the region found to have violated fundamental rights to organise and collectively bargain, as well as registration of unions. The right to strike was suppressed in 95% of countries in the region, while over half of MENA states arbitrarily arrested or detained workers (p.28). The list of the ten worst countries for working people is composed mainly of Global South countries, with MENA cases including Egypt, Tunisia, and Türkiye. Over the past few years, my research has focused on the political economy and labour relations of these three countries[i], and below I briefly discuss them with insights drawn from the ITUC report.

However, before turning to these cases, it is important to highlight some potential limitations or problems in the ITUC report. While its findings are grounded in substantial and credible documentation, the non-contextualised regional framing of the Global Rights Index risks reproducing a familiar issue regarding the Middle East: the tendency to isolate MENA as uniquely authoritarian or culturally predisposed to repression. By highlighting MENA as the “worst region” without sufficiently situating its labour regimes within broader historical and structural dynamics, the Index could be seen to implicitly (albeit unintentionally) reinforce exceptionalist interpretations that have long shaped conventional understandings of the region.

When considering the Global South in general, and the MENA region in particular, we must not overlook the dynamics inherent to uneven capitalist development, such as persistent global and regional inequalities, the imperatives of cheap labour in hierarchical global production networks, IFI conditionalities, and the long-term consequences of war, occupation, and imperialist intervention. In countries like Egypt and Tunisia, and historically in Turkey, for example, the role of the IMF and World Bank in shaping labour markets through austerity, privatisation, and deregulation has been central to the weakening of collective rights. The region is also the most unequal in the world by income and wealth, according to the World Inequality Report 2022—a fact that reinforces the political utility of repressing labour as a force of potential redistribution and mobilisation.

While specific political regimes certainly shape labour practices, and domestic political agency is not insignificant, these conditions should not be viewed as ‘anomalies’ within an otherwise democratic capitalism. That countries like the United States and the United Kingdom (major centres of ‘liberal democratic capitalism’) are both rated as systematically violating workers’ rights (with a score of 4, p.21) should caution against any simplistic division between “authoritarian” and “democratic” regimes under capitalism. Rather, what we are witnessing is a global pattern of labour repression under crisis-ridden global capitalism.

Türkiye: Labour Repression and Neoliberal Authoritarian Developmentalism

Türkiye continues to rank among the ten worst countries for workers, a position it has held for several years. The 2025 Index highlights a pattern of persistent violations, such as police violence against peaceful protestors, criminalisation of strikes, systematic union-busting practices and restrictions on trade union activity. As the report highlights, on May Day 2024, authorities arrested dozens of demonstrators attempting to access Istanbul’s Taksim Square, which has a symbolic and historical significance for the labour movement, but remains off-limits to labour protests. This is not an isolated incident, as several left-leaning leading unionists were arrested or put on trial in 2024 and 2025. The Turkish government maintains a tightly controlled industrial relations system, in which legal recognition of unions is difficult to obtain and strikes are routinely banned under the pretext of public order, essential services or national security. In many cases, unions face barriers to participation in tripartite consultations or are excluded altogether. Public sector workers, especially educators and health workers, are subject to heightened scrutiny and sanctions for collective action.

These all mark the continuation of a state-labour relationship shaped by the broader imperatives of Türkiye’s authoritarian neoliberal developmental model. Export-oriented growth, infrastructure-driven development, and world market competitiveness depend on the containment of wage demands and the fragmentation of organised labour. Trade union density remains low (around 15%), and collective agreements are limited in scope and coverage. In this context, labour repression serves not merely to silence dissent but to secure the conditions for capital accumulation.

Tunisia: Democratic Backsliding, Labour Under Siege

Tunisia’s inclusion in the Index’s worst ten countries since 2022 marks a sobering turn. Once hailed as a rare democratic success story in the MENA region, Tunisia has seen a rapid erosion of civil and labour rights under the presidency of ‘strongman leader’ Kais Saied (in power since 2019 and rules by decree since 2021). The ITUC report documents the deterioration in trade union freedoms, including the obstruction of union-led protests, arbitrary arrests of unionists, and increasing state interference in union affairs. The Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), historically one of the strongest and most influential trade union federations in the Arab world, has become a target of government hostility. The state has intensified efforts to delegitimise the UGTT. For example, a recent employment regulation law was approved in the parliament without any consultation (a legal requirement) with the UGTT and National Council for Social Dialogue. Several unionists have been detained or prosecuted, while labour protests have been met with heavy-handed policing. Furthermore, as the report states (p.47) ‘Authorities have increasingly used legal provisions — most notably Decree No. 54, which criminalises the dissemination of information considered false or harmful to public order — to prosecute individuals for social media posts or public expressions of dissent’.

This crackdown occurs amid persistent economic and social crisis in Tunisia. For years following the Jasmine Revolution, IMF austerity programmes led to subsidy cuts, wage restraint, and public sector hiring freezes—all policies that unions have opposed. Although Saied has recently rejected ‘IMF diktats’ and the proposed austerity programme of the IMF, ad hoc domestic austerity has continued amid high public debt and large fiscal deficits, as well as high unemployment, especially among youth and university graduates. This all requires not a top-down imposition of policies, but democratic, participatory, and socially legitimate progressive economic alternatives.

Egypt: Militarized Capitalism, State Control and the Elimination of Independent Unionism

In Egypt, labour rights remain almost entirely suppressed. The ITUC 2025 Index finds that legal restrictions, administrative obstruction, and criminal penalties effectively eliminate the space for independent trade unionism. Since the 2018 Trade Union Law, which required all unions to reregister under new state criteria, hundreds of unions have been dissolved or denied legal status. The result has been the consolidation of pro-government unions and the exclusion of independent organising from any official framework. The ITUC report documents that ‘In 2025, 14 unions remained unable to operate, despite meeting legal requirements, following the arbitrary dissolution of all independent unions in 2018’ (p.42). Workers attempting to organise outside of authoritarian corporatist structures (such as ETUF) face severe consequences. Arrests, dismissals, and surveillance are commonplace. For example, as the ITUC report highlights, ‘in 2024-2025, at least four unionists were arbitrarily detained on charges of “affiliation to a terrorist organisation”’ (p.42). Employers are often complicit in these practices as they file complaints to repress striking workers. Labour protests, when they occur, are usually small, informal, and vulnerable to immediate repression.

Egypt’s labour repression is closely tied to its political economy. The state’s central role in directing major infrastructure projects, managing public sector employment, and courting international investors demands a compliant labour force. The militarisation of the economy under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has further tightened control, ensuring that major employment sectors are dominated by military-linked enterprises where union activity is virtually impossible. In this context, labour repression is not an aberration; it is embedded in the functioning of the economic system. Recent IMF agreements since 2022 aims to reduce the ‘state footprint in the economy’, with further consequences for workers who would continue to face state repression, market discipline and austerity simultaneously.

The ITUC report, alongside the cases of Türkiye, Tunisia, and Egypt, highlights not only the scale of labour repression but the broader crisis of democracy under global capitalism. Addressing this requires more than procedural reforms or rhetorical commitments to rights. Without labour at the centre of economic and political transformation, calls for democracy risk remaining detached from the lived realities of those most affected by inequality, authoritarianism, and exclusion.

Footnotes

[i] See Erol, M.E. and Sahin, C.E. (2023) ‘Neoliberal Authoritarianism and Labour Unions in the Global South: The Cases of Egypt and Turkey’ Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 44 (1), DOI: 10.1080/02255189.2022.2119945

References

Erol, M.E. (2020) ‘From Dictatorship to ‘Democracy’: Neoliberal Continuity and its Crisis in Tunisia’, New Middle Eastern Studies, 10(2), pp.147-163, https://doi.org/10.29311/nmes.v10i2.3771

The Condition of the Working Class in Turkey: Labour under Neoliberal Authoritarianism, Co-edited with C.E. Sahin, Pluto Press London (2021)

Mehmet Erman Erol is a Lecturer in International Relations at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.