Digital Labor and the Politics of Unionizing: Women Workers in Lebanon and Egypt

Flexible Working Hours or Flexible Laborers?

Women’s participation in the labor force in the SWANA is the lowest of any region in the Global South, at roughly 20%, compared with 65% in Sub-Saharan Africa, 51% in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 33% in South Asia. Against this backdrop, it becomes clear why the digital economy draws women into paid work. For many women working remotely, the digital gig economy promises flexibility in when and how they work, allowing them to earn an income while continuing to carry out the care responsibilities assigned to them at home.

That flexibility comes at a cost. The digital gig economy keeps women permanently “on-call.” Employers expect availability around the clock, well beyond any defined working hours, and women end up performing unpaid care work at the very same time they carry out their paid tasks.

In this way, it further erodes the already fragile boundary between paid and unpaid labor. Instead of widening women's access to the public sphere, digital work has multiplied the demands placed on them in both spheres at once. A working woman wakes up to a list of job tasks, household chores, and care responsibilities that are unevenly distributed across class and household arrangements, moving fluidly between roles and making herself endlessly available to multiple demands on her time.

The digital gig economy has also created new obstacles to labor organizing. In the conventional economy, workers contest exploitative working conditions through collective assembly, drawing on their shared physical presence in a single workspace. Digital work fragments the labor force into isolated individuals who rarely know one another and have little capacity to organize across a company. The result is not only an absence of institutional protections; it is a structure that strips workers of the conditions that make assembly possible in the first place. As the case studies below show, women workers in both Lebanon and Egypt face this fragmentation alongside additional, country-specific legal barriers to organizing, compounded by the informality of their work and the double burden imposed by employers and families alike.

Lebanese Women in a Fragmented Political Context

The neoliberal system that has governed Lebanon's economy since the end of the Civil War has constrained the formation and practice of independent trade unions. Unlike membership in professional associations, joining trade unions is optional, and establishing a union requires prior authorization from the Ministry of Labor, a requirement that labor rights advocates have long argued undermines freedom of association and enables state control over union formation. Workers seeking to organize often face considerable risks. While Lebanese law does not explicitly permit dismissal for union organizing, legal protections against anti-union retaliation remain limited. Labor rights advocates note that only elected union leaders enjoy clear protection from dismissal, leaving many workers vulnerable to employer pressure or retaliation during organizing efforts. For digital gig economy workers, already scattered and unknown to one another, this fragmentation makes collective action all the harder.

The numbers show how little ground women have to stand on. In 2019, only 29.3% of Lebanese women were employed, and 55.3% of those employed worked in informal jobs. This leaves many women without any institutional foothold from which to organize for their rights. Platform workers, women specially, face a further challenge because much of their work remains informal and difficult to monitor. Recent reforms have begun to address some of these gaps. Law No. 3/2025 formally recognizes remote work and extends labor protections to remote, part time, and seasonal workers. Yet significant questions remain regarding implementation, enforcement, and access to social protection in practice, particularly for workers operating in highly informal sectors of the digital economy.

In response, women have begun forming informal networks and mutual support arrangements to meet the needs that employers and state institutions often fail to address, pooling resources, sharing knowledge, and providing practical support in accessing work opportunities. These initiatives are not vehicles for strikes or protests but everyday structures of survival, built to fill the gaps left by both employers and the law. Lebanon's limited but meaningful space for freedom of association leaves just enough room for such informal arrangements, even as the legal and administrative barriers to establishing formal unions remain significant.

Egyptian Women between Informality and Authoritarianism

Women’s digital labor in Egypt does not differ greatly from the Lebanese case, though the obstacles take a different shape. Informal work accounts for 63.5% of all women’s employment in Egypt, while women's labor force participation stands at just 17% of all women of working age. These figures point to a structural pattern of exclusion and exploitation: women are pushed into informal and unstable forms of work that pay less and carry far more precarious conditions.

Egyptian women have increasingly turned to online work, including freelancing, remote employment, content creation, and the sale of goods through digital platforms. Rather than eliminating precarity, digital labor often redistributes its costs. Workers absorb the price of production themselves, including equipment, connectivity, and tools necessary to sustain their income. Platforms and intermediaries capture value while shifting economic risk onto workers.

Collective action is further constrained by the legal architecture governing trade union organization. Law No. 213/2017 structures trade union organization in Egypt through a hierarchical system beginning at the level of company-based union committees, which must then be aggregated into general unions and national federations. This structure is accompanied by high membership thresholds and administrative requirements that significantly shape the conditions for union formation and limit the ability of precarious and informally employed workers to organize collectively.

In 2024, women workers led a strike against the Wabareyat Sammanud company, demanding the enforcement of minimum wage laws. The state met them with force, threatening their jobs and arresting workers to break the strike. Such episodes highlight the intersection between economic precarity and restrictive labor governance, where formal rights exist but remain difficult to exercise under conditions of informality and state control.

The result is a labor system in which women’s work is simultaneously essential and structurally undervalued. Digital and informal labor expand opportunities for income generation, but they do so within a framework that limits collective bargaining power and reinforces individualized forms of precarity.

The False Promise of "Flexibility"

The deepest cost of the digital gig economy is not only what it extracts from women but what it takes away from them, the ability to act together. Flexibility scatters workers, informality hides them, and labor laws built around a shared workplace leave digital workers without a real path to collective bargaining. The result is a workforce that is essential to the economy and structurally unable to negotiate its conditions. What is needed is not a predefined model of organizing, but a real opening for collective action rooted in how digital workers already labor in fragmented, informal, and platform mediated spaces. Only from within these conditions can workers begin to transform dispersed experiences into shared claims, and turn everyday forms of labor into the basis for collective demands on their own conditions of work.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.