Diverging Trajectories in 2025 Employment Contract Reforms in Egypt and Tunisia: Job Security, Precariousness and Social Dialogue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the 2025 reforms of employment contracts in Egypt and Tunisia. Historically, both countries reinforced job security after independence but curtailed it through neoliberal reforms: in Tunisia, fixed-term contracts (FTCs) were permitted for permanent activities up to four years in exchange for stronger protections for permanent workers; in Egypt, FTCs could run up to five years and be indefinitely renewed, a trade-off linked to strikes’ legalisation. The 2025 reforms, however, marked a trajectory divergence. Tunisia curbs precariousness by restricting FTCs. It establishes the permanent contract as default, limits FTCs to exceptional cases, permits one renewal and grants FTC workers priority for permanent positions. By contrast, Egypt enables more permissive standards. It allows FTCs for permanent tasks with indefinite renewals and consolidates employer discretion in open-ended contracts by reinforcing legal ambiguity: one provision conditions termination on notice, another requires a ‘legitimate and sufficient justification’. Anecdotal accounts of social dialogue surrounding these reforms suggest, at times—particularly when government objectives were at stake—the process favoured control over deliberation, with irregularities functioning as instrumental tactics, including successive draft circulation, secret negotiations, delays, sidelining of labour’s positions and, in certain instances, their outright exclusion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".