Global Labor Strategies

IRAQI UNION OFFICES RAIDED AFTER UNIONS OPPOSE NEW OIL LAW

Last week we ran a review of the documentary MEETING FACE TO FACE: THE IRAQ-U.S. SOLIDARITY TOUR describing a visit by Iraqi trade unionists to visit trade unionists and allies in the U.S.  Now Labourstart reports that U.S. and Iraq forces have raided the head offices of the General Federation of Iraqi workers, one of the groups that participated in the tour.  According to the Federation's official statement,

U.S. Workers Meet Iraqi Workers: The Movie

Modern labor movements developed in national contexts.  They are often dependent on national governments for legal rights and political favors.  Workers are a patriotic segment of many societies.  Governments often lean hard on worker organizations that don’t support their foreign policies.  For all these reasons, labor movements often support – reluctantly or enthusiastically – the foreign policies of their own countries, however foolish, immoral, or evidently anti-labor they may be.

Egypt and the Problem of Government-Controlled Labor Movements

Two previous posts described an unanticipated wildcat upheaval by 27,000 Egyptian textile workers in Mahala El-Kobra last December and its historical background [link to come].  This piece looks at Egypt as an example of a wider pattern: How U.S. and other global corporations utilize government-controlled unions created by authoritarian nationalist regimes even as they claim to be liquidating the legacy of those regimes in the interest of economic freedom.

Egyptian Textile Worker Strike: The Story Behind the Story

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.”

In the Shadow of the Pyramids

Their payment was three weeks late and their supervisors notorious for corruption.  So Egyptian workers at Deir El-Medina stopped work and walked out.  The year was approximately 1500 BC.  It may have been history’s first recorded strike.

At the very end of 2006AD another group of Egyptian workers, angered at the denial of their year-end bonus and the corruption of their managers, quit work and shut down their workplaces.  The strike startled the Egyptian people, and apparently the government and the government-owned employer as well.