In a previous blog we described an unanticipated upheaval by 27,000 Egyptian textile workers in Mahala El-Kobra (also translated as Mahalla al-Kubra) that occurred at the end of last year. Faced with denial of their year-end bonus, fearing privatization of their company, and disgusted with the corruption of their employers, they walked off their jobs, closed the plants, and demonstrated. After three days the company restored the bonus and they returned to work. This blog provides some of the background on Egyptian textile workers and the Egyptian economy in the era of globalization.
Less than a year before the Mahala El-Kobra strike, an article in the January, 2006 edition of the publication Business Today Egypt anticipated what was coming. It warned that with labor unions and professional associations {“syndicates”] mired in their own political battles and interested only in offering social services, “workers are increasingly taking matters into their own hands and striking for their rights.”
According to Business Today, despite the repression of independent labor activity, Egypt has seen more than 200 worker protests a year in recent years. Some are small in scale. For example, in November, 2005 a Cairo metro driver followed the company rules and refused to let a judge ride illegally in the driver’s cabin. A few days latter he found himself arrested and charged with assaulting the judge. Thereupon 30 metro workers staged a three-hour sit-in on the downtown tracks. The worker was released from prison and reinstated.
Other such wildcat actions have occurred in the larger government-owned companies. In February, 2005, for example, 400 workers at Esco Textiles held a sit-in to protest the privatization of their government-owned factory. They argued that as 10% part owners, they should have had a right to be informed in advance of the sale. They claimed that the government sold it to a prominent business leader for millions of dollars less than its true value. After a three months a three month occupation they returned to work with a promise of early retirement packages and the opportunity to retain union rights in the new company – a dubious opportunity, given that Egyptian law does not actually provide union representation for private sector workers.
While legal strikes are almost impossible in Egypt and the official labor federation has apparently never backed one, such actions have a long history. A fascinating study “Egyptian Textile Workers” by Stanford University historian Joel Beinin tells the story of textile workers’ protests in Mahala El-Kobra where last December’s strike occurred.
The provincial city in the central Nile Delta had 2,000 textile artisans by the end of the 18th century and remained a center of artisanal production a century and a half later. In 1927 the nationalist Bank Misr, whose slogan was “an Egyptian bank for Egyptians only,” established a large-scale textile plant in Mahala El-Kobra that became the largest industrial enterprise in the Middle East, employing over 25,000 workers by the end of World War II. An autobiographical novel by a former worker described the antagonism between local residents and peasants recruited to work at the factory who identified with their local villages, making it difficult to organize the workers.
In 1938, 1500 weavers struck with no help from outsiders, demanding an eight hour day and higher piece rates; 100 were arrested and paraded through town to shame them. In 1947, 26,000 workers struck for a month. The strike, supported by Marxist groups, was triggered by new disciplinary rules and fed by resentment at on-the-job abuse and fear of layoffs. The strikers gradually focused on the demand to establish an independent union to replace the company-sponsored one.
Military officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser seized power in 1952. One of their first acts was to suppress a textile strike, shoot its leaders, and pass a law banning strikes. Despite their need for workers’ support, they prevented the formation of a national trade union confederation until 1957, when the Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (ETUF) was finally allowed – on the condition that the government would have a veto over its leaders and activities.
In the early 1960s, Egypt’s nationalization program brought the large textile companies under government control. Despite government control of the unions, Beinin reports that there were
“sporadic outbursts of collective action and strikes in response to declining real wages in 1971-72 and 1975-76, reductions in consumer subsidies and the imposition of Washington consensus neo-liberal policies in 1977, price increases and increases in workers’ contributions to health insurance and pension plans in 1984-89, and the privatization of the public sector in the mid-1990s.”
Mahala El-Kobra textile workers featured prominently in each wave. Apparently their labor tradition, along with some of the grievances that fed it, has continued in some form, however sub rosa, down to the recent “unanticipated” strike. It seems the widespread reports of the acquiescence of Egyptian workers are, as Mark Twain might have put it, exaggerated.
[In a future blog we will explore how US and other global corporations are utilizing the repressive labor structures created by Nasser’s militarist nationalism.]
Your use of the word "blog" in this post is incorrect. Blog is derived from "web log" and refers to a web site with periodically updated narrative entries on its front page. To say a previous blog would imply that the reference is to a site that one had updated in the past but no longer does. To refer to a specific piece on a blog, a better term is "entry" or "post." In this case, you had written about the Egyptian situation in a previous blog entry or post and not a previous blog. Please consult Wikipedia for more definitive information.
Posted by: An Interested Party | January 22, 2007 at 05:54 AM