February 10, 2026
Mary Jirmanus Saba
Mary Jirmanus Saba is a geographer who uses film and other media to explore the histories of labor movement and anticolonialism in the Arab world and its connections to Indigenous cosmovisions in the Americas, feminist internationalism, and new transformative possibilities. Saba’s debut feature A Feeling Greater Than Love (2017) received the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at the Berlinale Forum. Saba’s writing has appeared in Antipode, Critical Times, The Guardian, Public Source and the LA Progressive among other venues. Saba’s latest film Mahdi Amel in Gaza (2024) is screening in community centers, public spaces, and also festivals.
Affiliation Saba is a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media.
Arabic version
What is the housework needed to keep social movements running, who does it, and why does this matter to today’s questions of labor organization and decolonization?
The “housework of the movement” describes the range of social reproductive activities that keep social movements up and running: from ensuring people are fed, children are cared for, envelopes mailed, equipment cleaned and maintained. More implicitly, the housework also includes the labor of fostering relationships, making sure people find wellbeing and therefore meaning within a particular struggle, connecting the day-to-day to the seemingly lofty goals of social transformation. US scholars Dana Frank and Angela Davis have used the phrase “housework of the movement” to make visible the often-gendered work of movement building that sustains both leadership and organization. They’ve argued that the usually unseen labor sustains the more visible movement leaders who speak publicly, gain prominence, and appear to be doing the critical movement work (while others do the actual organizing behind the scenes). But, as I will demonstrate through a series of ethnographic and autoethnographic observations, the housework is about much more than maintenance work – it is movement strategy.
The Social Reproduction of Movement: From Floor Sweeping to Reckoning with Disempowerment
One of my most visceral memories of antiwar organizing in college at the start of the Iraq war was being part of a small group, majority women and genderqueer, putting together a student movement strategy retreat in a church basement in Somerville Massachusetts in the wake of the US-NATO invasion of Iraq. After two days of intense discussion, half of the core conference organizing team, four femmes: Jamaican, Trini, Irish, and Lebanese Palestinian, found ourselves sweeping the basement floor and putting away chairs, while our male colleagues stood outside, smoking cigarettes and talking tactics and next steps. Properly vexed, we asked them why they thought their theorizing was more important than getting the space back in order.
But where was the strategy being produced? The classic answer might be: in the intense political discussions outside, which we femmes missed out on. But I now think the answer is far more complex.
While I don’t remember how we resolved this tension with our colleagues back when I was 19, what I do know clearly is that all our efforts (my dear readers included) failed to stop the Iraq war and the never-ending Bush-Blair-Obama era of colonial expansion. Although globally in the early 2000s we organized what were until then, the largest and visually stunning demonstrations in human history, still the war on terror led to deaths of more than three million Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis and restructuring of privacy, and surveillance and policing laws throughout the West, and innumerable other changes in governance and subjectivities. Today we are all living out the multifaceted consequences of our collective inabilities to halt that colonial expansionist war – sped up and livestreamed from Gaza.
Whereas on the one hand the feeling of successfully co-organizing massive spectacular demonstrations in my late teens was exhilarating, on the other, the aftermath of our demonstrations not stopping the war – what felt like our collective inefficacy – was disempowering. The war machine bowled over many people’s stamina – widening the gaps within the “big tent,” with masses of people disengaging, in the West anyway, many implicitly accepting endless war out of immediate view as the price for the relative comfort of social media-fed digital consumerism and the growing biotech bubble. For those of us who remained engaged in antimilitarisms, meeting numbers dwindled. We pivoted to other forms of (ironically also performative big tent) politics like the social forum, then responded to the next major crisis (like Israel’s July war on Lebanon), perhaps without learning much. Two decades later, one lesson we might take from this layered dilemma is that visible spectacle of movement is not necessarily itself sufficient to engender material transformation. So what might looking away from movement spectacle, or more closely at movement housework tell us?
The Backstage of Organizing: The Erased Role of Women in the Gandour Workers’ Strike
To clarify this question, I want to pivot slightly in space and time to a site of struggle where this question comes sharply into focus: my ongoing research on the role of women and rank-and-file in the Lebanese labor movement at the start of the 1970s. Motivated by my own aforementioned gendered organizing experiences, I began researching the undocumented role of women and rank-and-file workers in the prominent 1972 wildcat strike at Gandour chocolate factory in Chiyah. I quickly learned that women workers made up more than half of the workforce at Gandour, despite being largely absent from public narration of that history.
What I found in my research was not that women and rank-and-file do a lot of the work but receive very little recognition (although that may also be true). Instead, what I learned is that the housework of the movement – that often devalued and under-regarded range of activities – was in the case of this strike literally generating cutting edge movement strategy. Strategy that held the potential to alter the course of history. Strategy that was largely ignored by leadership.
Let’s take the strike. The public narrative is like this: after months of agitating for better wages, the right to join a union, an end to gender-discrimination and cancellation of Article 50 of the labor law which permitted arbitrary dismissal, on Nov 7 1972, the Gandour strike committee, a wildcat formation including members of the Organization of Communist Action (OCA), the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) and the Iraqi Ba’ath party (as well as unaffiliated workers), stood in front of the factory and urged their coworkers to halt work. Theatrical speeches and altercations with management later, the strike was fully observed among 1200 workers, the factory’s production suddenly and dramatically halted across its two branches. Over the next seven days, the wildcat strike took on an outsized significance: with delegations of students, other factory workers, and prominent progressive public figures paying the striking workers a visit. On day eight, the factory management conspired to bring in strike breakers. The newspapers reported that striking workers threw rocks at the buses and clashed with police, who opened direct fire on the strikers, killing two young workers. The following day, tens of thousands marched in the streets of Chiyah and down to Parliament in downtown Beirut, demanding accountability for the deaths and justice for the fired workers. Less prominent in the archive is that although the workers were reinstated because of public pressure, their demands were not met. When they renewed the strike a few months later, it ended with a lockout of the main prominent organizers, who were also then blacklisted from Lebanese industry entirely .
The Gandour strike is narrated by the Left as a key turning point of popular and revolutionary movements on the road to what would later become a Civil War. It is renowned for its prominence and repressive state response, for pushing the OCA onto the political stage, and for becoming a flash point around which the coalition formed, later becoming the Lebanese National Movement (LNM). Most of us who have been part of social movement rank-and-file could concur that these legible political facts were made possible by the rank-and-file’s less visible activities (even if that simply includes showing up to a demonstration and bringing a friend). Without the rank-and-file, a disruptive labor stoppage would instead have been a handful of guys standing around making speeches. More interestingly though, looking in depth at the Gandour workers' housework offers us important strategic political directions and historic counterfactuals.
While the national movement leadership was giving speeches and posturing in solidarity with the workers, the working women and men of the factory were organizing compliance. Motivated by the possibility of improving their arduous working conditions, the inclusion of gender-specific demands, and (yes) speeches delivered by the good-looking and charismatic strike leaders, a motley group of women joined the strike committee on day one. Interestingly, while OCA women cadres had been tasked with specifically recruiting Gandour working women, primarily Shia migrants from the South and Beqaa and Palestinian workers, for the most part, their would-be recruits don’t appear to have been active in the strike . Instead, the women who I spoke with emphasized the felt justice of the strike, and the demands’ resonances with their lived experience of exploitation, and the broader politico-cultural landscape of internationalist struggle. To me, the women detailed invasive body searches on their way out of the factory, supervisors who insulted and swore at them, and the physical impact of long hours and low pay (less than their male coworkers). But they also recalled friendships developed on the shop floor, outings and gatherings outside of work hours, and neighborhood camaraderie that broached geographic, class and sectarian lines.
The Promises of a Potential Revolutionary Horizon: Cross-Sectarian Network and Class-based Solidarity
This relational work – that is, the housework – was done before, during, and even in absence of a clearly articulated revolutionary horizon. But it is the necessary foundation on which the tall order of a wildcat strike is built. By connecting people’s lived experience with the political goals that only collective action can produce, the housework translates the (often arduous) social reproduction of everyday life in colonial capitalism into political praxis. Crucially, this is both at the level of the household (where life is reproduced and sustained amid manufactured austerity), but also in the wider community, workplace, neighborhood and kinship relations, old and new.
As such, Gandour’s women workers leveraged factory and neighborhood relationships to organize work stoppage compliance, for example by going door to door to their coworkers whose houses they already knew, to assure they did not come to work and break the strike. They circulated to coworkers in and around Ghobeiri, Hay Al-Sillom and Ein el Rammenh (sub neighborhoods of Chiyah each with a slightly distinct sectarian and geographic-origin character) . But this housework is about more than sustaining collective action. It is literally the praxis of flexibly sensing what needs to be done next. That is, housework is a movement strategy.
A few months before the strike, the factory management began bussing in women workers from two primarily Maronite Christian villages near Saida to replace the increasingly militant workforce – harnessing geographic and growing manufactured sectarian tensions to divide and conquer. Although the Christian women also came from economically marginalized rural villages, they wore distinctive uniforms. Some workers suspected they received additional income. Notwithstanding management’s goals, workers made friends across these lines. Two of the bussed-in Maronite Christian women joined the strike committee. With their striking coworkers from distinct geographic and sectarian origins, the working women organized delegations to Saida trying to convince the Maronite workforce to uphold the stoppage. None of this was planned by or even coordinated with movement leadership. It was done through self-reflective housework.
Famously, the workers’ efforts did not succeed. On strike’s day seven, a bussed delegation arrived from Saida to attempt to staff the factory. Strikers threw rocks and blockaded the road to prevent the bus from arriving. Police fired on the strikers and the strike was broken.
To entertain the counterfactual here, had the housework been followed to its conclusion, stronger relationships among women across sectarian and geographic lines might have deterred strike breaking. More, it is worth extending this metaphor to speculate what might have been possible had this front-line housework been incorporated into top line movement strategy of the Left as it hurled towards a sectarian-structured civil war that pitted working class neighbors against one another across sect.
Not only was the work of compliance-generating housework necessary to produce the renowned strike, a launching point for the preeminent progressive political coalition the LNM (the classic analysis of the invisible organizing labor), but the housework also created its own political possibilities and strategic insights that should not be ignored.
Reflecting on Contemporary Movements: Housework is Movement Strategy
What would happen if we took the insights of the social movement housework, today, to reflect on our own contemporary movements? To reorient amid the ongoing experience of even greater apparent imperviousness of power to our collective actions. To live the simultaneous escalation of social protest and resistance at recently unmatched levels, alongside the escalation of unity of state and corporation in consolidating its power, control and resources, while testing out new mass cultural level tactics to make us feel disempowered and disillusioned, all amid increasingly obvious climate collapse.
Quite often this behind-the-scenes labor which can offer a necessary reorientation, reconnection with us, our sense of place, and each other, is literally right in front of us. It’s up to us to look for it.
Works Cited
Boutros, Joelle. 2015. “أزمة معامل غندور: عندما كان القانون يحمي الطرد التعسفي.” مجلة المفكرة القانونية 31.
Khuri, Fuad Ishaq. 1975. From Village to Suburb: Order and Change in Greater Beirut. Chicago, ILL: University of Chicago Press.
Kobeissy, Farah. 2015. “أسطورة ‘موت’ الطبقة العاملة: من مصنع غندور إلى عاملات المنازل.” المنشور, January 9.
Jirmanus Saba, Mary, dir. 2017. A Feeling Greater Than Love. Tricontinental Media.
Jirmanus Saba, Mary. 2022. “What’s the Use of a Strike Archive?: On Image Archives, Surplus, and Solidarity.” Critical Times (Berkeley, Calif.) 5(3):663–87. doi:10.1215/26410478-10030274.
Petran, Tabitha. 1987. The Struggle over Lebanon. London: Monthly Review Press.
Traboulsi, Fawaz. 2008. A History of Modern Lebanon. London: Pluto Press.