A Time Magazine feature on the Egyptian strike wave, that includes an interview with me:
Saad al-Husseini may be a member of a banned political organization, but he’s feeling the wind at his back. At the entrance to al-Mahalla al-Kubra, one of Egypt’s largest industrial towns, the tall, bearded “independent” Member of Parliament from the Muslim Brotherhood – whose members are regularly arrested and tortured by the state – hops into a car, buoyed by signs of local dissent. “There are two strikes in Mahalla today,” he says, cheerfully. “We will show you.”
The strikes involving several dozen workers in the Nile Delta town about 60 miles north of Cairo are just the latest in over a dozen that have already occurred the same week – and that’s just in Mahalla. A number of similar strikes are underway throughout the area, in what is shaping up to be another long, hot summer of discontent in the Nile Delta.
The densely populated Delta has some of Egypt’s best farmland, and is also the country’s industrial heartland. Mahalla, where tens of thousands of striking textile workers have won their demands on multiple occasions over the past three years, has become a symbol of labor militancy. Many of the strikes are called by the Independent Textile Workers’ League, which operates like a union but without official recognition. “Since December 7, 2006, when the workers of [Misr Spinning and Weaving Company] factory went on strike, that was a historical day. It was the first and the biggest strike in Egypt. And the strikes haven’t stopped since,” says Husseini.
Strikes, sit-ins, and factory occupations are technically illegal in Egypt – except in the unlikely event that they were authorized by the government-run Egyptian Trade Union Federation. But legal restraints have not stopped workers from laying down their tools; analysts attribute the phenomenon to the declining living standards that have accompanied the government’s market-oriented economic policies, combined with the absence of democratic channels of recourse in President Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian regime. By some estimates, Egypt has seen at least 250 strike actions this year alone, organized locally and often featuring women workers playing a leading role. “Everything in the country is expensive, and most workers work two jobs, and still, it’s not enough,” says Wael Habib, a Mahalla strike leader.
The unrest comes at a critical time for Egyptian politics. President Mubarak, who has run an iron-fisted police state since 1981 and is meeting President Obama in Washington on Tuesday, is now 81 years old, and the press is buzzing with speculation about imminent succession – most likely by his son, Gamal. While some see the Nile Delta strike wave as nothing more than a fight for daily bread, others say they’re a portent of what’s to come.
“They were chanting against Hosni Mubarak, against Suzanne Mubarak, they were chanting against Gamal Mubarak. Outright chants,” says Hossam al-Hamalawy, a left-wing journalist and labor activist, of recent strikes in the Delta. “They had 20,000 people marching for an hour in the city of Mahalla demanding that Mubarak will be overthrown, and then people say that these workers are not political?” Even so, says Beinin, most of Egypt’s strike leaders don’t belong to political parties, and doubts that Egypt’s opposition groups will be able to channel workers’ dissent into a unified push for political change.
The strike weapon has been used by blue collar workers and urban professionals alike, often using social networking sites as organizing and publicity tools. And while many Egyptians remain apathetic about their ability to affect change through national elections – widely dismissed by local and international monitors as rigged to keep Mubarak’s part in power – many have found in the strike weapon a means of making the government more responsive, particularly to demands for pay raises and the payment of previously promised bonuses and dividends.
“Corrupt general elections are a major phenomenon here. There are human rights violations and arrests for no reason . . . There are huge economic monopolies, and the country’s land is distributed to relatives and friends of the men in power,” says Husseini. “For all of these reasons, the [political] opposition and the strikes are growing.” The Egyptian government has accused the Brotherhood of instigating the strike, but labor experts such as Stanford historian Joel Beinin say there’s no evidence of that beyond the solidarity offered by some Brotherhood individuals, like Husseini, who hail from blue collar constituencies. Many of the Brotherhood’s leaders are actually businessmen with no inclination to promote the development of a labor movement that could challenge their own interests.
“This is democracy,” says Hamalawy. “This is people taking control of their lives and their livelihoods and their incomes, and they’re just telling the powers that be that they cannot just keep on dictating this bad situation forever. I am sorry if journalists are only accustomed to democracy that is conducted in the parliament, which is a sham at the end of the day . . . What’s happening in these industrial urban centers, that’s the real politics.”
Indeed, the rising tide of labor unrest has prompted some local politicians and activists to take note. Husseini says the government has sought opposition support for its policies of privatization of industry, “But we say that this is impossible. We want a big industrial sector owned by the country, so that it guarantees security for the country.”
And the opposition’s response is to tie the aspirations of striking workers to their political situation, by pointing out that their plight is based on their lack of democratic rights. A general strike that broke out in Mahalla in April 2008, which resulted in bloody clashes with the police, were part of a nationwide protest action against the regime. Although some optimistic activists say Mubarak’s power is already cracking, it remains to be seen whether mass action in the workplace and outside will have any effect on shaping the post-Mubarak era.
“Hopefully the coming Egyptian uprising is going to bring about a radical regime. A regime that’s committed to the demands of the people,” says Hamalawy. “I think it’s the people who at the end of the day are going to choose which scenario to go forward.” Presumably, the security forces that have kept Mubarak, and before him Sadat and Nasser in power for more than a half century, have other ideas.