CDS Seminar Event - Laboring Liberation: The Jerusalem Electricity Company Workers’ Strike of 1979

Speaker: Omar Jabary Salamanca

This presentation examines the overlooked 1979 strike by Palestinian workers at the Jerusalem District Electricity Company (JEDC) as a pivotal moment of anti-colonial resistance. It argues that the strike, which fused demands for better wages with a political struggle against Israel’s erosion of the company’s concession and autonomy, demonstrates the inextricable link between class, national liberation and development. By mobilizing broad popular solidarity to defend a critical national infrastructure, the JEDC workers’ union articulated a mode of resistance in which labor solidarity became a primary vehicle for asserting sovereignty and contesting the political economy of settler colonial occupation. Their actions foreground the central role of an organized urban working class in the broader Palestinian struggle for development and liberation.

Omar Jabary Salamanca is a writer, teacher, and organizer, and Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Trained as a geographer, his work spans critical geography, urban studies, political ecology, and visual culture, with a focus on Palestine and the Middle East. He is also interested in cultural work, particularly the social histories and archival practices of anticolonial and solidarity movements. He is currently completing a manuscript on the political lives of infrastructures, forthcoming with Verso Books. Previously, he was an FWO Research Fellow and Lecturer at Ghent University, a Marie-Curie Global Fellow at Columbia University and a FNRS Research Fellow at Université libre de Bruxelles. He serves on the editorial board of Arab Urbanism and the advisory boards of Antipode, ACME, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and is a founding member of The Kitchen and University Workers for Palestine.