Hossam el-Hamalawy
My labor sources tell me the textile workers in Ghazl Shebeen el-Kom and Kafr el-Dawar “are watching closely what is happening in Mahalla.
There is willingness among the workers, at least those who led the strikes in the two factories last February, to try to mobilize for some form of solidarity action with Mahalla,” if the latter stages a sit-in or goes on strike.
My sources in Mahalla confirmed that today at least four Central Security Forces trucks loaded with conscripts were deployed around the town’s train station. At least another six trucks are deployed around the company’s compound gates. Plainclothes security agents are EVERYWHERE inside the compound and outside.
I was also told there’s an emergency meeting happening now for the company management.
No strikes or sit-ins happened today in any of the company’s factories, though I was told there is a general mood of militancy, and there’s talk about the crackdown that happened yesterday. Some workers, I was told, brought food supplies with them to the factory, just in case a strike and factory occupation break out suddenly.
Below is a video I took of Ghazl el-Mahalla activist Sayyed Habib, who managed to escape the security siege yesterday, and arrive in Cairo to join the protest in front of the Ministry of Social Insurance. ‘Am Sayyed bashed the corrupt Factory Union Committee officials, calling for their impeachment. He also said that the number of resignations mailed to the General Federation of Trade Unions has reached 9,000.
Here’s also a Daily Star Egypt report by Liam Stack:
A delegation of 100 factory workers from the delta town of Mahalla was barred from holding a demonstration at the Downtown Cairo headquarters of the General Federation of Trade Unions on Sunday to demand the removal of their local union officials.
The workers charge their union leaders with corruption, and say they have been co-opted by the management of their state-owned factory.
But the delegation was prevented from leaving Mahalla by a phalanx of state security personnel, who stopped them at several points along the way.
According to witnesses, state security officers first stopped the group from leaving town by bus by confiscating the the driver’s license of their hired bus driver. When the workers then tried to reach Cairo by train, they were surrounded inside the station and kept from boarding.
“At the station, state security surrounded us and would not let us board. The police were everywhere, and they threatened to arrest all of us,” said Muhammad El Attar, a spokesperson for the Mahalla workers
In defiance of this crackdown, workers in Mahalla say they may launch a new strike early this week.
The Ghazl El-Mahalla factory became iconic within the labor movement after a successful December strike brought 27,000 workers together to demand their annual bonuses, and it is unclear what effect a new strike there would have on workers elsewhere in the country.
Workers in nearby Shebeen El Kom, who staged a strike of their own this winter, have already declared that they are “in solidarity with the Mahalla workers,” although they have stopped short of declaring a new strike.
The Mahalla workers first demanded the removal of their local union representatives in January, say organizers, and today’s protest was meant to pressure the General Federation into responding to that demand.
If the local representatives are not impeached, the workers threaten to resign from the General Federation en masse and form an independent union, which would be the country’s first.
“The workers are saying now that under no conditions will they accept the continuation of those labor union officials,” Kamal Abbas, the General Secretary of the CTUWS, told The Daily Star Egypt in February.
“Just the idea of presenting your resignation from the General Federation is unprecedented. It never happens. This is going to have a ripple effect in the same way that the Ghazl El-Mahalla strike sent a message to the entire working class of Egypt.”
According to the government, the message that the CTUWS sends is one of unrest and instability that threatens the social peace of the country. The state says the group “causes unrest” and “puts stability at risk,” and in the last month has shut two of its branch offices.
Labor organizers and a coalition of human rights advocates organized a separate demonstration on Sunday in front of the Ministry of Social Affairs, to protest the most recent CTUWS closure, which also took place in Mahalla.
Activists say the shutdowns are not about keeping the peace, but are part of a larger crackdown on political opposition, and accuse the regime of a campaign of harassment and intimidation.
State Security cracked down today on Mahalla labor activists, banning them from traveling to Cairo to lobby their General Federation of Trade Unions to impeach their corrupt local union branch as well as a set of other demands related to work conditions.
More than 100 workers assembled in the morning near the Mahalla Train Station, where two buses had been hired to transport them to Cairo. One bus was to carry a delegation to the Ministry of Social Insurance, to express solidarity with the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, and the other was to take the workers to the HQ of the General Federation of Trade Unions to stage a sit-in if their demands were not met.
The workers were shocked to find the buses’ owner showing up and instructing his drivers to leave immediately, citing threats from State Security agents of revoking the buses’ licenses and the closure of his business. The agents also were heavily present around the factory compound, and the city entrances/exits. When a group of workers moved to the train station, in an attempt to catch a ride to Cairo, they were met by State Security agents. They besieged the activists, including Muhammad el-Attar, in a circle, and refused to let them move for roughly an hour.
While a handful of workers managed to escape from the police, and trickled to Cairo in microbuses, back in the company, several hundred women workers in the garments-making Factory Section 4 went on strike for 45 mins, protesting the shortage in raw materials supply, which leads to the decrease in their bonuses, which are based on units produced.
Mahalla worker and blogger Kareem el-Beheiri has been following up on the situation there all throughout the day. You can read his postings here.
“There are murmurs in the factory among workers about a second attempt to go to Cairo and launch a sit-in at the General Federation,” he wrote. “There are also murmurs of possibly a new strike. Tension is running high.”
Those workers who managed to make it to Cairo, joined around 30 rights and labor activists who assembled inside the Ministry of Social Insurance compound around 1am to protest the closure of the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services offices in Naga’a Hammadi and Mahalla.
There was a group of Central Security Forces soldiers deployed outside the ministry building, in addition to usual faces from State Security’s Counter-Communism bureau and Qasr el-Nil Police Station. But they did not ban the activists’ silent protest. Still, it was amusing to watch plainclothes thugs deployed by the police to guard the ministry’s building.
The activists demanded to meet the Minister, and after negotiations with State Security agents, a delegation (including Kamal Abbas the CTUWS director and Karama Party MP Hamdeen Sabbahi) met with the minister’s assistant in charge of the NGOs portfolio, who basically told them, the decision to close down the CTUWS offices was not “the ministry’s call.” So who’s call was it, asked the activists. The woman refused to reply. “It’s of course a decision by State Security,” commented Kamal Abbas. Another meeting is scheduled on Monday between CTUWS officials and the Ministry.
Here’s a short video clip of today’s protest, shot by the anti-corruption watchdog Shayfeencom
The Center for Socialist Studies issued a statement denouncing the police assaults on labor activists and strikers. Human Rights Watch also blasted Mubarak’s regime’s crackdown on the CTUWS offices:
The Egyptian government should reverse its order to close two offices of the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS) and should cease harassing the organization, Human Rights Watch said today.
The organization offers legal aid to Egyptian factory workers, educates them as to their rights, and reports on labor-rights issues in the country. The Ministry of Social Solidarity has blamed the CTUWS for inciting widespread labor unrest around the country. Egyptian officials have ordered two branches of the CTUWS to close within the last two weeks.
“Closing the offices of a labor rights group won’t end labor unrest,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The government should be upholding legal commitments to Egyptian workers instead of seeking a scapegoat.”
On April 11, approximately 100 police officers arrived at the CTUWS office in the Nile Delta town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra to deliver an administrative decision ordering its closure. This came just over a week after General al-Sharbini Hashish, head of the Local Council in the southern industrial town of Naga` Hammidi, issued an administrative decision on March 29 ordering the closure of the CTUWS branch there on the grounds that it violated Egypt’s law on associations, though the order did not specify how.
Government action against the Naga` Hammidi branch of the CTUWS began in mid-March, when officials from the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration called the center’s representatives in for questioning, saying they had orders to investigate the legality of the center’s operations. Days before Gen. Hashish issued the order to close the center, the local representative of the Ministry of Social Solidarity requested CTUWS representatives to come to the local office of the Interior Ministry’s office of State Security Investigations. They declined the invitation.
The government’s moves against the CTUWS come amid continuing labor unrest throughout Egypt. According to a March 2 story in the independent newspaper Al-Masri al-Youm, there were 222 sit-ins, strikes, and workers’ demonstrations in 2006. The largest was a public-sector textile workers’ strike at a factory in al-Mahalla al-Kubra in December 2006.
That strike came after the al-Mahalla office of the CTUWS helped inform textile workers of Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif’s March 3, 2006, decree that all public-sector textile workers’ year-end bonuses should henceforth be equal to two months’ salary, up as much as 500 percent from a flat, pre-tax bonus of 100 Egyptian pounds (US$18). Factory managers initially denied that the decree had been issued, saying that it was a nonbinding political promise. When representatives of the government-affiliated General Textile Worker’s Union failed to make good on their election promises to extract the increased bonus from the government, more than 20,000 workers at the Mahalla al-Kubra textile factory went on strike until the government offered a 45-day bonus.
Since then, thousands of workers have resigned from the General Textile Workers’ Union, saying the elections were fixed in favor of the government’s candidates, and more than 30,000 textile workers at other factories in the Delta have staged protests. Thousands of cement factory and railway workers, some of whom told reporters they were inspired by the Mahalla workers’ success, have staged protests ranging from slowdowns to strikes. Officials from the Ministry of Social Solidarity have blamed the CTUWS for the unrest on television talk shows and on the floor of the Shura Council, the upper house of Parliament.
You can find the HRW statement in Arabic here.
Keep your eyes on Mahalla.