"20% drop in labour protests not indicator of better work conditions in Kingdom — report, 1 April 2018

... In a report it released on Wednesday, Jordan Labour Watch said the country saw a decrease by 20.4 per cent in the number of protests organised in 2017 compared to the previous year... [T]he report said that the decrease in protest numbers cannot be considered as an indicator of improvement in the working conditions in Jordan, explaining that the drop is rather linked to “a feeling of neglect experienced by most of the workers over the lack of response to their demands, in addition to the pressure exerted by many employers and various government institutions to prevent groups from carrying out labour protests”...  72 per cent of the protests were carried out by groups of workers without any official representation, while trade unions staged only 6.5 per cent of the protests... [P]rogramme manager at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Amal Abu Jiries noted that “even though Jordan was the first Arab country to sign an... ILO agreement, we cannot reach decent working conditions in Jordan as long as the law itself keeps on contradicting the agreement”, adding that “we need to improve the legislation in order to enforce social protection”... The Labour Law “doesn’t allow a group of employees to form a trade union without the permission of the tripartite formed by the government, the employers and other trade unions”, noting that “this has prevented the formation of new labour unions in the past 40 years”...