Protection as Exclusion: A Postcolonial Feminist Reading of Gender Discrimination in Lebanese Labour Law

Abstract

The Lebanese Labour Code (1946) contains a structural contradiction that has received insufficient theoretical attention: Article 26 explicitly prohibits gender-based discrimination in the workplace, yet Article 27 and Annex 1 — both unchanged since the law's colonial-era enactment — ban women from nineteen categories of industrial employment. This paper argues that this contradiction is not a legislative oversight but the inherited architecture of French Mandate paternalism, which constructed the Arab woman worker as a body requiring protection — and then used that protection as the primary mechanism of economic exclusion. Drawing on postcolonial feminist legal theory — specifically Kandiyoti's (1988) concept of the patriarchal bargain, Abu-Lughod's (2013) critique of the saving-women discourse, and Fricker's (2007) epistemic injustice — the paper conducts a close reading of the Labour Code as a colonial text that continues to produce gendered subjects eighty years after independence. The analysis identifies four discriminatory mechanisms operating simultaneously within the law: protective exclusion from named industries (Article 27); total exclusion from the law's scope for domestic workers (Article 7); symbolic equality without enforcement (Article 26); and the absence of intersectional protection for hijab-wearing women and for working mothers managing child sick care. The paper also recovers the history of Lebanese women tobacco workers' organised resistance — particularly the 1930–1946 protests — as the suppressed political context of the law's enactment. It concludes by tracing the health and social consequences of this legal architecture and asking what a genuinely decolonised Lebanese labour law would require.