Concerted campaigns

Karim El-Khashab talks to historian Joel Beinin about the sudden spurt of successful industrial action undertaken by workers

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On 16 April workers from the Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla stepped up their campaign to impeach their representatives at the National Federation of Trade Unions, staging a sit-in front of the union's headquarters in Cairo. The government, in response, appears to have escalated its own campaign to deter workers from taking industrial action, according to Mohamed Attar, who said that on the day of the planned protest hundreds of central security forces turned up at the factory.

"We brought food with us just in case we had to organise a sit-in then and there," says Attar, adding that many workers were told to come early to prevent them from being barred from entering the factory.

The buses transporting protesters from Mahalla to Cairo were prevented from departing, leaving workers no choice but to travel by train, where they were also hassled by security forces. Since Sunday, Attar has been effectively banned from factory grounds, allowed to enter only during the hours of his shift.

The spate of worker sit-ins and protests has been gathering momentum for months, with the largest occurring in December when 27,000 workers went on strike in Mahalla. To understand the demands, history and possible trajectory of what appears to be a revitalised labour movement, Al-Ahram Weekly spoke with Professor Joel Beinin, director of the Middle East Centre at the American University in Cairo, whose extensive work on labour issues in the Middle East includes the book Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class 1882-1952.

Are there any similarities between what is happening in Mahalla and the 1952 Kafr Al-Dawwar confrontation between workers and the new revolutionary regime? Then, as now, the demand was for an independent trade union to represent the workers' interests.

In 1952, says Beinin, protesting workers thought they would find support among the free officers. "After all the owner of the factory, Hafiz Afifi, was close to the monarchy and the workers thought the regime would stand by their side and support their cause as they had supported the coup." The regime, though, was suspicious of the workers and refused to allow a union to be formed though it did improve pay and benefits.

People going on strike, argues Beinin, was not something the new military regime was ever going to take lightly. "Remember, the officers came with the slogan Unity Order Work and believed the corruption and laziness of the old regime was the cause of Egypt's [problems] and the reason they lost in 1948 [in Palestine]." The regime was also wary of communist influence.

By 1956, however, with the ascendance of Gamal Abdel-Nasser to the status of hero across the Arab world and the creation of the Arab Federation of Trade Unions the government was left with no choice but to create an Egyptian counterpart. There was a trade-off, says Beinin: "strikes became illegal and in exchange workers were given better rights, and most important it became very difficult to dismiss workers". This pact between the government and workers only started to unpick relatively recently and during many of the strikes and sit-ins seen today job security is almost always among the workers' demands.

During Anwar El-Sadat's presidency, says Beinin, mistrust between workers and the regime grew. The majority of workers were either Nasserists or on the left and viewed Sadat's open door policy with some suspicion.

"In my interviews with workers," Beinin recalls, "the reaction to Sadat was always mixed. Most viewed him with suspicion, every time he came to Mahalla they would get a bonus and nobody minded that but they were still in favour of the old economic system and were starting to feel the pinch of his policies." As one worker told him, "when [nationally revered singer] Abdel-Halim died, we all wore black, when Sadat died no one wore black".

But what were the linkages between workers and political parties?

In the 1980s, says Beinin, there was a rift between workers and the Tagammu Party caused mainly by the Tagammu's closeness to the government as it fought a rising Islamist tide. "This was not because the workers supported the Islamists but because they saw the Tagammu as being too close to a regime that the workers perceived as not advocating their interests."

Beinin sees little evidence of any real links between the Muslim Brotherhood and organised labour. There are Islamists among the workers but they play no clear leadership role. Beinin dismisses government claims that the Islamists were behind the strikes in Mahalla as nonsense. What is interesting, though, he adds, is that when you look at the Muslim Brotherhood's economic paper, it could easily have been written by the communist party. It says almost nothing about Islam and instead focuses on workers' rights and defending against privatisation.

"There is a class struggle going on within the Brotherhood and splits that have not been seen in the organisation before. The old leadership consists predominantly of businessmen and has a business outlook whereas the younger generation, especially in Alexandria, has a different background and vision."

In Helwan, a predominantly blue collar town with large iron and steel factories, a Muslim Brotherhood candidate was elected to the People's Assembly. It is by no means clear, though, whether this was a protest vote, a question of worker support for the Brotherhood or because of the candidate's personal appeal with voters.

In the 1990s, following Egypt signing its structural adjustment package with the IMF and World Bank, worker unrest began to increase. There were protests in 1995 in Helwan and Mahalla and in Esna in 1996. "The response of the government was to give early retirement packages to workers so that the new employers who had bought state enterprises wouldn't have to fire them." While some workers invested this money in productive small enterprises others didn't and were hit hard when the Egyptian economy slowed down in the late 1990s. By that time the government could no longer meet the costs of redundancy packages, and the practice more or less ended. Only recently, with the economy picking up thanks to a rise in tourism, increased tolls from the Suez Canal and high oil prices, has the government found itself in a position to once again meet at least some of the workers' demands. "That is why," Beinin says, "the workers are winning."

Is the government in any position to continue to pay off workers?

Beinin is cautious in answering the question. "I am a historian, I can tell you with some confidence what happened in the past, but I have far less of an idea what could happen in the future. What is clear is that this policy is unsustainable given that most of the revenues of the government are coming from external factors outside the Egyptian economy and with little to do with production." As long as there is money in the bank then why not, but he thinks it unlikely such a situation can continue.

The crux of the issue, he argues, revolves around how serious the regime is in giving the workers what they have been demanding since 1952, ie an independent trade union free of government interference. "This would be a relatively easy experiment to make," he says, because if the fear from democracy is the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islamists, the sector of Egyptian society in which the Islamists are weakest is the trade unions.

Many commentators speculate that in the event of free trade unions emerging they will fall under the influence of the Nasserist Party or else left leaning groups. They are claims Beinin finds unconvincing. It is hard, he says, to see any of these parties imposing their will on workers. They will be present, and offer advice, but basic organisation occurs on the shop floor where workers remain suspicious of political parties in general. The idea of a free union is in any case, he points out, still in an embryonic phase.

Though tensions look set to increase between workers and the government over the issue of freedom to organise -- workers recently rejected an offer to create an ad hoc body comprising trade union representatives, workers from the shop floor and factory managers is settling disputes -- Beinin thinks it unlikely that the government will launch a crack down on workers any time soon.

"I think the security forces understand that if you take on workers you take on an entire town the livelihood of which depends on the factories."

"If you don't have a plan for people and don't offer early retirement packages, and their job security is being threatened, along with decreasing social insurance, you can't blame people for being angry," says Beinin. And it is that anger, he argues, that has eroded the old system of alliance between workers and the state. What will replace it, though, is not yet clear.