This is huge, because there has been for the last 10 years an enormous wave of labor protests in Egypt that’s included over two billion people participating in perhaps 3,300 strikes, sit-ins and other forms of protest. So that has been the background to this whole revolutionary upsurge of the last several weeks. Up until now, there has been relatively a low level of worker participation as workers—not as individuals, of course; people participated in various demonstrations—but there’s been very low level of worker participation in the movement. But in the last few days what you’ve seen is tens of thousands of workers linking their economic demands to the political demand that the Mubarak regime step aside. And this means that what had been perceived as a gap between the mostly economic demands that were raised over the last decade and the political demands that were raised by the intelligentsia, that gap has been closed, and now these things are fused together.
What happened was the textile workers of Mahalla al-Kubra—there are about 22,000 of them, it’s the largest single enterprise in Egypt—were running a campaign to raise the national monthly minimum wage to 1,200 Egyptian pounds a month. That campaign is still in place. And they called for a general strike of workers on April 6, 2008, to support that demand. The security forces occupied their factory for three days before April 6th. Using a combination of coercion and cooptation, they made sure that the strike didn’t happen. Instead, what happened was a more or less spontaneous demonstration of mainly women and children protesting in the main square of Mahalla al-Kubra about the high price of food and especially subsidized bread, which is the key consumption item for a great majority of Egyptians. The protest was greeted with a hail of rocks by uniformed security people, just as we have seen in the days after January 25th in Tahrir Square. But there was no actual strike in Mahalla al-Kubra.
There were only few strikes elsewhere in Egypt. There were larger-than-usual demonstrations in Cairo, but not exceeding 2,000 people. So, broadly speaking, this was a failure. But it was a failure on the way to what now appears to be a greater success. This was the first time in recent years that workers tried to organize something nationwide with a political component to it. Raising the minimum wage is not simply an economic demand, it’s a political demand, because it is in opposition to the whole neoliberal economic restructuring project that has been proceeding very rapidly in Egypt, especially since the government that was recently deposed was installed in July 2004.
Through Suez eight percent of world trade goes, 35,000 ships a year, about a hundred every single day; 1.8 million barrels of oil a day go through there.
The Suez Canal obviously is one of the most strategic sites in Egypt. The British occupied Egypt in 1882 in order to secure the Suez Canal, so there’s a long history of Western intervention in Egypt over the Suez Canal. The workers in Suez, and the city of Suez in particular, have probably been the most militant in confronting the Mubarak regime since this revolutionary upsurge began on January 25th. On January 25th, there were two deaths in Suez. The protests were extremely militant there, attacking the local headquarters of the National Democratic Party, attacking the police station.
The fact that the Suez Canal workers are going on strike means that one of the most important economic institutions of the country is being idled. It’s a huge blow to the continued viability of the Egyptian economy under the Mubarak regime. It will, if it continues, put tremendous pressure on them. It’s not only the Suez Canal workers, although they are probably, in Suez, the most important single group, but there are also Suez steelworkers at Suez Canal who have gone on strike and ship repair workers and textile workers around the city of Suez, because there’s a special industrial zone there. So, Suez, in particular, has emerged as one of the most militant sites of confrontation in this last period.
The Egyptian Trade Union Federation was established in 1957 under the Nasser regime, and since then it has been essentially an arm of the state. And it has not participated at all in the labor upsurge of the last decade. In fact, most often it’s acted in opposition to it. So, over the last 10 years or more, workers have—when they have gone on strike or otherwise taken collective action, they have either elected strike committees, as happened in Mahalla al-Kubra, the big textile center in the Delta, or local union committees have split and some members of them have supported insurgent workers, some members of them—some members have stayed with the official trade union structure, in other cases spontaneous leaderships have emerged in the course of the struggle. But in no case have strikes or sit-ins or any other kind of collective action over the last decade been led by the official trade union structures.
So that has meant that in a few cases where workers were especially strong, independent trade unions have been formed for the first time in Egypt since the monarchy was overthrown in 1952. The biggest and most important of these was the real estate tax assessors’ union, which, after an 11-day sit-in in front of the Ministry of Finance began—first of all, won the strike, won a 325 percent wage increase, and then began to organize an independent trade union which now includes 35,000 tax assessors, Now, they are civil servants, they’re not properly workers, but all sorts of people like that are unionized in Egypt. Then, more recently, in December 2010, medical technicians formed an independent trade union. Then, on January 30th, just a few days after the initial demonstration of January 25th, these two independent trade unions and representatives from about a dozen major industrial areas—Mahalla in the Delta, Helwan south of Cairo, and several others—came together and announced in a press conference that they are organizing an Independent Trade Union Federation.
This was a revolutionary action, because this is illegal. The Egyptian law requires that every union that is formed affiliate with the Egyptian Trade Union Federation via the appropriate national sector union. So if you’re a steelworker, you belong to the National Union of Steelworkers, which is affiliated with the Egyptian Trade Union Federation.
Over the last decade, the government has had quite a lot of cash. It’s been selling off public assets, firms owned by the public sector. Suez Canal tolls were raised. The price of oil was high. So there was a lot of cash in the public till. And as it was moving very rapidly to implement the neoliberal economic restructuring, the thinking apparently was, “OK, we have this money. We know that workers are going to suffer from this transition. If they protest, we will meet their economic demands. We won’t entertain any political demands whatsoever. But if they demand a wage increase, if they demand payment of back bonuses that are overdue or any such things like that, we’ll talk to them about it.”
And in many, many cases, workers actually won very substantial economic demands, and there were only a few instances when the security forces intervened to crush strikes. And this is very different than what happened in the 1980s and 1990s: when workers went on strike, the security forces, and in some cases even the army, rolled into factory towns and literally shot people down. So, throughout the last 10 years, what workers have learned is, if you engage in struggle, A, you won’t be crushed, more likely than not, and B, you have a pretty good chance to win something. And that, of course, encouraged people, emboldened people, taught them that they didn’t need to be confined by the official trade union apparatus, which is an arm of the regime, in any case.
Discussion with Joel Beinin.
Joel Beinin, Professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. He is the former director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo and the author of several books on Egypt.
– from democracynow.org