Donkeys with hides at the tannery, Morocco

The historic tanneries of Fès — Chouara, Sidi Moussa, Ain Azliten — have worked without substantial change since the 11th century. The leather district still employs several thousand people — tanners, dyers, apprentices, skinners and middlemen — in an artisanal network that survives outside the frame of modern wage labour.

In Morocco around 77% of non-agricultural workers are in the informal economy: with no written contract, no health cover, no pension. In the artisanal supply chains of the medinas — leather, brass, ceramics, textiles — the share is close to total.

Morocco's traditional tanneries use lime, pigeon droppings, cattle urine and chromium baths for tanning and dyeing: tanners — often children and teenagers — work for hours immersed in the vats, with documented effects on skin, respiratory tract and fertility. Labour inspections in the sector remain sporadic.

Global capital does not replace older forms of labour: it leans on them, recycles them, keeps them alive at the margin. The hide that leaves a donkey's back in a Fès alley may end up, two months later, on the belt of a Milan executive.