2 - 8 May 2002
Issue No.584
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 May 2002 Issue No.584 |
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Al-Ahram:
A Diwan of contemporary life (440)
In 1929, Al-Ahram tackled a domestic issue which had its roots much earlier: Egyptians who aspire to nothing better than becoming civil servants. A commentary in the paper suggested that the problem lay in how children were being brought up, whether in the home or school. Being reluctant to voice their opinions or take the initiative, they grow up to become something akin to machines, thus pinning their hopes on government employment "since it is the type of work similar to that of machines." Professor Yunan Labib Rizk* explores the origins of this overwhelming desire by Egyptians to reach for something lower than the sky
The run on government jobs
Mohamed Ali
In 1884, Bishara Taqla, then editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram, wrote: "The Egyptian man, brought up by his parents to be well educated, inevitably feels -- as do his parents -- that he merits a position in the civil service. Once he obtains such a position, he pours all his energy into obtaining a decoration of merit, a promotion in rank or an increase in salary, whether or not he is qualified for service. Then, after years of government service, he becomes lethargic and idle and it becomes impossible for him to undertake any other job, even to engage in agriculture and working the land, having ignored such activities throughout his career. Thus, he concentrates all his attention on obtaining all possible material benefits through his position, without consideration of the ethical aspects."
Forty-five years later, an Al-Ahram editorial on January 1929 commented that one of the root causes of some of Egypt's domestic problems lay in "the armies of students who invade our schools and who are no more than the embryonic core of the civil service. This is inevitable so long as we lack the prerequisites to equip them for a liberal career beyond, we regret to say, the eloquent words and lofty sentiments that we produce as the daily fodder for our newspaper columns." The fact is, the writer continues, generation after generation of students aspire to no more than attaining the title Effendi, that emblem of status conferred upon civil servants. The fault for this lies in the way Egyptian children are brought up without having developed a sense of independent thought or action. "Until they reach the age of majority, Egyptian children remain dependent upon the directions issued by every other inhabitant of the home. They cannot speak until spoken to and they cannot move unless told they may. Herein sprout the roots of reluctance to voice opinion and fear of initiative, as a result of which children grow up to become creatures almost like machines, operating only if forced to. It is little wonder, therefore, that they pin such hopes on government employment as it is the type of work most similar to that of machines."
To read these two articles, spaced so many years apart, one gets the impression that time had come to a standstill. Indeed, one might argue that with respect to this aspect of Egyptian life at least, the clock has not yet started moving again.
Nevertheless, this should not prevent us from exploring the historical origins of this overwhelming passion for civil service employment and that intimate bond that evolved between education and government jobs.
To start, we must go back to Mohamed Ali, who needed to staff the modern government administration he sought to establish. As the old educational system, at the pinnacle of which stood Al-Azhar, was incapable of fulfilling the requirements for such an administration, the founder of modern Egypt introduced a secular educational structure of primary, preparatory and upper school levels. Initially, the system had a military nature but by the time of Khedive Ismail, it had become largely a civil establishment.
Beyond this clearly formal relationship between education and government jobs, perhaps a more influential factor was its social repercussions, specifically the rise of a distinct social class. The effendis, or civil servants, were considerably better off than most of their compatriots. In addition to fixed salaries, work with the government conferred important symbols of status, ranging from fixed working hours to special codes of dress, distinguished by the tarboush, the headgear that inspired the name mutarbashin as a sobriquet for civil servants. In addition, there was the general aura of respect they acquired as representatives of "the government," with all the awe and veneration the term evoked among ordinary Egyptians.
However, difficulties began when it no longer became possible to control student numbers, as had been the case in the early 19th century. On the one hand, Egyptians saw in modern schooling a door to material and social success. Thus, whereas at one time aversion to modern schooling was the rule, there arose such a high demand that families were willing to foot the expenses for their children's education after cutbacks began on government-subsidised tuition. In addition, when government schools could no longer accommodate the demand, concerned individuals and philanthropic societies began to establish private schools to produce yet more effendis.
The obvious outcome of this movement was that the supply of degree holders exceeded government demand. This situation steadily worsened and became particularly acute in 1929. That was the year that the Great Depression struck, and Egypt felt its repercussions severely. As a dependent economy, Egypt had always been vulnerable to global economic fluctuations. Apart from the Misr Bank, all other banking establishments at the time were branches of European banks and all the major commercial establishments were similarly branches of European ones, or dependent upon their products. Thus, when recession hit, it hit hard, with the result that thousands of workers were laid off and tax revenues plummeted which, in turn, reflected on the nation's corps of civil servants.
A second factor to bring the issue of civil servants to the fore at that time was the rise of the Mohamed Mahmoud government to power in June 1928. One of those minority party coalition cabinets that typified the reign of King Fouad I, the "iron grip" government as it was dubbed, pushed a platform of domestic reforms in order to divert public attention from its suspension of constitutional life. Unfortunately, the reforms it had in mind needed money at a time when money was in short supply. At the same time, this government was very wary of its civil service functionaries. It was not long before students who, as British authorities in Cairo put it, had made up the "armies" of the populist Wafd Party, were to make up the core of the mass uprising that erupted in 1919 and, even before World War I, constituted the backbone of the nationalist movement that was embodied in the National Party headed by Mustafa Kamel and the Umma Party headed by Ahmed Lutfi El-Sayed.
To handle this powerful social force, Mahmoud had little choice but to use the carrot and the stick, as we observe in the following Al-Ahram reports. A letter from a civil servant to Al-Ahram of 21 January 1929 reveals one way in which the carrot was wielded. Under the headline, "Abolish special raises," the author complains about those salary hikes "the government grants every year to a select group of its employees who win the approval of their superiors." The purpose of giving raises should be to encourage junior employees to perform their jobs well and to promote the spirit of competition, he wrote. "However, the situation has turned topsy-turvy because of the rampant favouritism that still prevails." Naturally, the "favourites" were those who could best demonstrate their loyalty to the government of the "iron grip."
The stick, on the other hand, manifested itself in a collection of laws the Mahmoud government drafted to prohibit civil servants from engaging in political activities. On 1 February 1929, Al-Ahram announced that the cabinet promulgated a law "prohibiting government employees from participating in political assemblies and from publicly declaring political opinions or inclinations." The law further stated, "Employees of the government may not provide information to the press, whether published in Egypt or abroad, and whether appearing in Arabic or in any other language. Nor may they voice personal opinions via the press, or work as correspondents or agents for the press." The penalty for violating the provisions of the law was dismissal.
Several days later, a second act was passed to extend the clampdown to "staff and wage earners in the employ of those authorities licensed to administer an essential public service, such as the railway, tramway, electricity and water services." These employees were prohibited from going on strike without first notifying the director of the authority or the governor. A sentence of up to a year in prison or a maximum LE100 fine awaited "all who attempt to incite the afore-mentioned staff and wage earners to stage a strike during work hours without observing the provisions stipulated in this article."
Against this backdrop, Al-Ahram in 1929 reopened its "civil servants" file to add a number of articles pertinent to this class of workers. Many of these stories included letters to the editor and a good number came from civil servants themselves. The first issue the newspaper addressed was the perennial question of the relationship between education and government employment. Of the many articles which appeared that year on this subject, perhaps the one most to the point was the letter submitted to the newspaper by "an Egyptian," as the writer signed himself. "Legions of students are invading our secondary schools which have no place to send them after their graduation," he complains. "In spite of the enormous number of students enrolled in our schools, people continue to press day and night for more institutes to open. In 10 years at most, we will have an employment crisis and only God knows what dire consequences it will bring." To forestall such a crisis, L'Egyptienne suggests that students should be channeled into the crafts and industrial training schools. This would mean, however, that they would have to "discard the garb of vanity and don the blue overall so as to learn carpentry, lathing, mechanics and electrical engineering and to equip themselves to earn their living with their own hands."
Favouring this option was the fact that Egyptian mothers no longer found it shameful for their sons to become craftsmen while clear-thinking Egyptian fathers had begun to advise their sons not to go on to secondary school but instead train in a marketable skill. This change in attitude led to an increase in the number of people "who have set their minds on independent professions. As a result, soon you will see educated individuals working in every craft, and you will find professional carpenters who will manufacture dining room sets. You will rest assured that what the fancy department stores display as foreign-made products will, in fact, have been the work of an Egyptian like you. Similarly, you will find the blacksmith engineer and the mechanics engineer, and you will realise that Egypt is in the course of a revival that will, after a period of time, lead to industrial economic independence," the letter said.
Another common grievance was that the government failed to match applicants' fields of specialisation with the posts to which they were appointed. The grievance was particularly commonplace among those who had studied abroad at the government's expense, many of whom complained that they were treated no differently after their return to Egypt than before they set off to obtain higher certificates. "Why did the government spend all this money on us?" one such individual asked. "Why should we spend a significant portion of our lives concentrating on a specific branch of knowledge or acquiring a specific skill only to be excluded from the type of work which we have been trained for?"
In reply, Al-Ahram said the heads of government departments feared the competition the younger talents posed. And it held that while it may be true that the recruits were trained precisely to replace Egyptians currently in office, such replacements would only take place after the incumbents retired. A more important consideration, however, was the need to train Egyptians to replace the foreigners who proliferated in various key government administrations. "If government administration managers cannot understand these facts and conduct themselves in accordance with the desired objective, higher government officials should step in to set matters right. The very existence of grievances by qualified candidates and the need to benefit from their know-how compel us to remove the grounds for this grievance."
At the other end of the educational spectrum of government employees, the clerical staff, too, had a complaint. This was the regulation that stipulated that for those employees without higher educational qualifications, 15 years were required to secure permanent tenure. Those belonging to this category demanded treatment on a par with their degree-holding colleagues, which meant the right to secure permanent tenure after only 10 years. Al-Ahram sympathised with them, remarking that the government's treatment of them was "remarkably odd." Some of these civil servants had greater expertise and performed better than their degree-holding colleagues, it argued, "and the only flaw the government can find in them is that they lack degrees, as though a degree is all that is needed to perform a job well and with consistency over a long period of time. Clearly, the government simply wants to see a piece of paper headed 'certificate' while the work the employee performs has no value in itself."
One lengthy letter by Asaad Lutfi Hassan, head of the Civil Servants Syndicate, leads us to understand that the syndicate had been founded only recently, for Hassan appeals to his colleagues to lend their support by joining the syndicate and demonstrating that "together we will be strong and the poison of those who envy us will not harm us and their vicious rumours will not deter us from our intent." Although he does not inform his readers as to what those "vicious rumours" were, we presume his fellow civil servants knew.
Al-Ahram observes that the syndicate leader dedicated his fullest efforts to solving the problems of government employees, such as tenure, the right to reasonable pensions and life insurance schemes. His was a praiseworthy goal: to secure the guarantees that would enable syndicate members and their families to live in dignity commensurate with their social status.
However, the most significant development in 1929 was a government decision, the likes of which probably had never been taken before. In October, civil servant salaries were cut by 10 per cent. The means it used to do this was to restructure the civil service in a manner so odd that it inevitably received the attention of the press in the autumn of that year.
On 4 October 1929, Al-Ahram announced that the government had completed its design for a new civil servant structure that would effect a 10 per cent reduction in their salaries. Rather than justifying this move on the grounds of the drop in national revenues due to the global economic crisis, the drafters of the new system maintained that the cost of living had gone down. By way of proof they cited statistics to the effect that credit ceilings had dropped by nearly a quarter of their 1921 levels. However, they quickly added that they had no desire to make a similar reduction in salaries because "people have come to aspire to a more affluent lifestyle, as a result of which many things that were until recently considered luxuries are now necessities, or at least viewed as such."
Evidently, the committee commissioned to draw up the restructuring scheme had instructions to consider all possible ways to ensure that all employees would be affected equally. Thus, for example, they decided to abolish what were termed "sub-grades" which had been "a means to confer raises at other than their stipulated times by promoting candidates from one sub-grade to another or to a full grade higher." However, they realised that to abolish sub-grades would create certain unacceptable inconsistencies whereby, for example, the head of a department and his deputy would end up at the same grade, which would be "unfair." Therefore, instead of totally abolishing the sub-grade system, they tried to limit it as much as possible.
Salary cuts were scaled from 8.3 per cent for a grade eight to 10.8 per cent for grade one.
There then followed the business of ranking officials in special branches of government and law enforcement. First came the judiciary in which, for example, deputy prosecutors were ranked at grade four, chief prosecutors at grade three, deputy magistrates at grade two and chief magistrates at grade one. After comparing figures across the board, the committee concluded that it had done its best to make this grading structure consistent with the general civil service grading structure, although it did admit that it also sought to safeguard certain privileges enjoyed by employees in the judiciary.
Police and army officers were another matter. Indeed, the committee raised salaries of grades first and second police lieutenants on the grounds that these officers "are under pressure from the many responsibilities they bear in the performance of their duties and because the Police Academy can now be considered a higher educational institute since a secondary school certificate is a prerequisite for admission." The committee was not so generous with the higher ranks, granting the captain only a 3.8 per cent salary hike, justifying its decision on the grounds of having granted first and second lieutenants a hefty raise and having kept the salaries of the captains -- "who make up the majority of police officers" -- at their current levels for budgetary considerations.
Army officers, too, were a special case, particularly in view of the fact that it was possible for them to reach a stage where they would be pensioned off without promotion to higher rank. Therefore, the committee report stated, care was taken to ensure that the salaries of the ranks above lieutenant-colonel remained fixed, with the exception of the rank of major, whose period of service is much longer and, therefore, should benefit from periodic incremental raises.
Another special case in the system was the diplomatic corps because its members already had a salary cut in 1926. Hence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded that it review the situation "so that salaries are commensurate with the position of employees stationed abroad." The committee indeed introduced a number of measures to resolve this situation. Firstly, it reduced salary scales but raised representation allowances "to enable our diplomatic representatives to perform their duties abroad and represent Egypt in an appropriate manner." The reasoning behind this decision was that although it was not possible to compel a member of the diplomatic corps to account for the way he spent his salary, it was possible to keep tabs on how he spent his representation allowance. As for diplomatic allowances, they varied according to the posting, from as high as LE4,800 per year in London and Washington to LE3,000 in Paris, Rome or Berlin, and down to between LE1,800 to LE1,200 for other capitals.
Secondly, as the representation allowance was very small for the lower echelons of embassy staff, it was decided to give employees in these categories an additional foreign posting and dress allowance to the tune of LE15 per month for the rank of secretary, LE12 per month for attachés and LE10 per month for archivists. For those fortunate to be posted in London or Liverpool, these allowances were 20 per cent higher.
The last category of government employees was coroners who were granted special status among all other medical practitioners working for the government. The coroners office "is still in the process of formation and it is important to encourage doctors with skill and integrity to join it," said the committee report by way of justifying this distinction, adding, "Moreover, coroners are not permitted to work abroad and they eventually become incapable of practising curative medicine."
Needless to say, the other members of the medical profession were incensed at what they perceived as unwarranted discrimination. Angry letters poured into the offices of Al- Ahram, particularly from the staff at Qasr Al-Aini medical school and hospital. The conditions under which they had to work in the course of the performance of their duties were no less strenuous than those faced by coroners, they argued. But then, their disgruntlement at the restructuring was felt across the board -- government employees generally expect salary increases, not salary cuts.
* The author is a professor of history and head of Al-Ahram History Studies Centre.
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