66 Exit from Authoritarianism The Arab Workers Union was also impacted, however, by tensions within Yemen’s anti-British coalition following the ousting of British forces from Aden in 1967. Members eventually split off to form the Yemeni Workers’ Union, which was founded specifically to “forge a link between the workers here and the workers’ movement and the revolutionary socialist movement in the homeland, and therefore to transform work within the ranks of the workers and to increase their understanding of our Yemeni homeland” (Halliday 2010[1992]: 91). Organizers also formed the Arab Workers League in Birmingham and the Yemeni Welfare Association of Manchester in response to these developments, which helped local migrants with passports, taxation, and other issues related to their sojourns. The Yemeni Workers’ Union, with chapters across different cities in England and Wales, faced a number of challenges, however, due to workers’ intense schedules, geographical spread across different locales, and illiteracy. The lack of full-time middle-class professionals to organize this work also impacted mobilization for the Arab Spring, which I address further in Chapter 6. Interestingly, while some Yemenis did mobilize as part of the Farmworkers’ Movement in California in the 1970s, Yemeni unions were not keen to strike, as this would impact their remittances; they did not possess strike funds (Halliday 2010[1992]: 103). Yemeni unions were also significantly marginalized within white-dominated unions. Rather than focus on workplace issues, they formed these organizations to help with home-country state building, including appeals by Yemen’s postcolonial southern government to help build a new nation. They also fundraised for development projects such as water infrastructure, mobilized to support Palestinians, promoted literacy classes, and held community meetings. Literacy in Arabic and English was especially important, given that about two-thirds of Yemenis from South Yemen were illiterate (Halliday 2010[1992]: 98). In 1973, the Yemeni Workers’ Union funded a hospital in South Yemen along with migrants in the Gulf region, and other medical aid from Birmingham in 1975, as well as roads, schools, and cultural centers, with most of the funds coming from workers in Birmingham and Sheffield (Halliday 2010[1992]: 94). They also sent funds to the Palestinian resistance and the Omani resistance against the British. According to Pennock (2017: 71), “Yemenis who supported the Omani rebels against the British held political events in the Southend [of Detroit/Dearborn], mainly haflas (parties) that incorporated lectures and poetry about the rebellion.” According to Seddon (2014), these organizations declined in the 1980s as a recession led many Yemenis to return home or to find work in the Gulf region. In Britain, the community was roughly halved from about fifteen to eight thousand by the 1980s. Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan attracted many North Yemenis for work via chain migration to the automobile industry. Historian Pamela Pennock (2017: 180) reports that their communities, while often unwilling to strike, did “remain engaged in the political conflicts brewing in Yemen . . . and some of https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press