With more individuals considered displaced from their homes from manmade and natural disasters than ever before, humanitarian actors are rethinking how to coordinate aid efficiently and effectively. As part of this rethinking, UN agencies, international NGOs, state actors and private donors from the EU and elsewhere are calling to ‘localize’ aid. This presentation explores how this localization agenda, which emphasizes ‘global South’ and ‘local’ engagement in aid decision-making processes and practices, is affecting a significant group of local actors—national aid workers—in Jordan, a major global aid hub. Interviews with these workers, who live in the region which produces and hosts the highest number of displaced persons worldwide, highlights localization’s unforeseen effects: new forms of labor and challenging work conditions for national aid employees. This is because tasks, resources, and employers’ expectations are formally and informally organized based on particular meanings associated with ‘the local’ as a category that are contradictory, ambiguous, and not necessarily aligned with how national workers understand ‘local’ in the first place. This presentation highlights the effects of the latter on workers’ daily routines and jobs, revealing critical ways in which humanitarianism contributes to inequalities through work.  In so doing, this presentation hopes to encourage broader discussions about labor processes and practices that rupture and reinscribe global North-global South power relations both within and beyond the aid sector as well.