Revolutionary Egypt

Connecting Domestic and International Struggles

Reem Abou-El-Fadl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317508779
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

In 2011 the world watched as Egyptians rose up against a dictator. Observers marveled at this sudden rupture, and honed in on the heroes of Tahrir Square. Revolutionary Egypt analyzes this tumultuous period from multiple perspectives, bringing together experts on the Middle East from disciplines as diverse as political economy, comparative politics and social anthropology.

Drawing on primary research conducted in Egypt and across the world, this book analyzes the foundations and future of Egypt's revolution. Considering the revolution as a process, it looks back over decades of popular resistance to state practices and predicts the waves still to come. It also confidently places Egypt's revolutionary process in its regional and international contexts, considering popular contestation of foreign policy trends as well as the reactions of external actors. It draws connections between Egyptians' struggles against domestic despotism and their reactions to regional and international processes such as economic liberalization, Euro-American interventionism and similar struggles further afield.

Revolutionary Egypt is an essential resource for scholars and students of social movements and revolution, comparative politics, and Middle East politics, in particular Middle East foreign policy and international relations.

Part I

Contesting authority, making claims

Inside Egypt

1 Reluctant revolutionaries?

The dynamics of labour protests in Egypt, 2006–13

Marie Duboc

In recent years, Egypt has been experiencing the largest wave of labour action since the 1950s, with over two million Egyptians protesting in the workplace between 2004 and 2011 and rising numbers of labour action since 2011.¹ Labour protests have been organized in workplaces nationwide to voice the discontent of the sectors of society who had benefited from Nasser’s redistributive policies. While these protests have included groups whose economic and social status has been increasingly threatened by casualization, such as medical doctors, industrial workers, teachers and civil servants, the demonstrations staged by residents against water cuts, poor housing and crumbling public services, and also against unemployment, have exhibited the wider range of grievances that have affected all sectors of the Egyptian population.

Retrospectively, the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 does not seem surprising given the extent of discontent that had been voiced against his regime. However, Charles Kurzman (2004) has warned social scientists against the temptation to reconstruct collective actions retrospectively by assigning meanings to the social processes that animate them. Like the 1979 Iranian revolution which overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty, the 2011 Arab uprisings in the Middle East have created much anxiety among scholars about their successful or failed attempts to predict these events, and this has led to two reactions. First, there have been attempts to see in the slightest manifestations of discontent the explanations behind the emergence of the Arab uprisings; second, the same factors that used to account for the ‘absence of political change’ before 2011 suddenly became the root cause of the revolutionary processes.

By situating labour strikes within the context of the uprisings that led to the fall of Mubarak in 2011 this chapter focuses on the significance of labour protests in Egypt in order to understand political developments in 2011. It aims to avoid the pitfalls of retrospective causations by embracing an approach that ‘look[s] past our obsession with causation’ (Kurzman 2012; see also Bennani-Chraïbi and Fillieule 2012) in order to shed light on the underlying political and social processes that animated labour protests.

While this involves identifying continuities between a decade of labour contestation and the revolutionary process since 2011, it also means acknowledging moments of rupture, when workers’ actions do not explain everything or seem to contradict the reality of political events. Labour protests before 2011 did not overtly call for the ouster of Mubarak. They remained very localized, were not coordinated with each other and actually refrained from going beyond labour grievances. However, workers did not support Mubarak’s regime either. Like the vast majority of Egyptians, they abhorred the regime that oppressed and humiliated them. By exploring the dynamics of actors’ political participation in their own right, rather than assigning meaning to social actors’ actions, this chapter seeks to understand the dynamics of labour protests. I argue that repression does not explain why workers refrained from taking an anti-Mubarak stance, and I use the concept of ‘non-contentious politics’ to shed light on the accommodating of structures of power in order to secure gains from decision-makers; in this way workers’ protests managed to sustain themselves, but also to make more substantial achievements such as gaining support from outsiders and extending the channels of contention.

This chapter is structured in four parts. First it will introduce the corporatist arrangements that have shaped state–labour relations in Egypt, workers’ trade union representation and the opportunities to voice labour grievances. Second, I will examine what I define as the ‘non-contentious politics’ of labour protests. This involves a pattern of mobilization relying on the use of overt action to advance a claim, but with a tacit understanding that the grievance should not be framed as overtly challenging the regime. The third part will show that this pattern has pushed the boundaries of contestation, in particular by challenging the state-controlled trade union structure which was the target of protests in a number of workplaces where strikes were organized. Finally, the last section will address the role of labour protests in the 2011 uprisings and the ongoing revolutionary process.

By centring my argument on the fact that labour protests did not take an overtly anti-Mubarak stance I do not embrace a normative approach implying that workers’ actions should be reduced to purely opportunistic protests. Nor am I minimizing their significance in Egyptian politics. On the contrary, by studying the conditions, dynamics and processes that have led labour protests to adopt specific tactics I aim to go beyond interpretations that overlook the dynamics of the labour movement in Egyptian politics, either by romanticizing workers as the ‘vanguard of the revolution’, or by claiming that they have no political consciousness (wa‘i siyasi). This chapter is based on field research conducted as part of my doctoral studies. It involved a two-year ethnographic study conducted among textile workers in two textile cities of the Nile Delta region (Mahalla al-Kubra and Shibin al-Kawm) as well as interviews in Cairo with labour activists, journalists, trade union representatives and government officials.

State–labour relations

Between 2004 and 2011, over two million Egyptian workers voiced their grievances through strikes, sit-ins and other forms of protest against poor living conditions caused by the erosion of wages, rising inflation and precarious employment. These protests formed the largest wave of labour action since the 1950s. They involved Egyptians from a wide range of sectors, from workers to medical doctors, university professors to tax collectors. 2004 marked a turning point in the number of these labour protests, with a rise from 86 in 2003 to 266 labour protests in 2004. However, from 2007, mobilization intensified with 614 protests organized in 2007 compared with 222 in 2006.²

The Egypt Spinning and Weaving Company (Misr li-l-Ghazl wa-l-Nasij) in Mahalla al-Kubra, the largest textile mill in Egypt with 22,000 workers, has been considered the centre of gravity of labour protests since December 2006, when the factory went on strike to demand the payment of a bonus which the prime minister had recently announced. The private press widely covered the Mahalla strike and its successful outcome. Although the Egypt Spinning and Weaving Company has a long history of labour militancy dating back to the 1930s, the resurgence of strikes in the 2000s was not confined to this company. Labour protests spilled over to other textile factories, but also to different sectors – such as cement companies and railway transport – and in September 2007 the Mahalla factory went on strike again to demand the implementation of the financial plan that had been negotiated during the December 2006 strike.

These labour protests took place in a context of rising inflation and the implementation of a privatization programme by Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif’s government (July 2004 – January 2011) that included the restructuring of public sector companies. Attempts to reform and privatize the public sector date back to the early 1990s and Mubarak’s acceptance of a loan from the International Monetary Fund. This was itself a development from the ‘open door’ (infitah) neoliberal turn introduced in 1974 by President Anwar al-Sadat, Nasser’s successor.³ However, the year 2004 marked a turning point in the intensification of economic reforms: between 2005 and 2009 the state’s total revenues from privatization were nearly eight times higher than they had been from 2000 to 2004.

In this period, many Egyptians were concerned about the degradation of their purchasing power, with an average inflation rate rising from 2.9 per cent in 2000–2003 to 16.5 per cent in 2004, and peaking at 18 per cent in 2008 (CAPMAS 2010). Indeed 2008 was a year of unprecedented mobilization in Egypt, with over half a million Egyptians protesting in the workplace and the intensification of collective action to the streets to denounce the skyrocketing increase in food and commodity prices.

The wave of strikes that swept Egypt must also be understood within the context of the nature of state–labour relations. Since 2004 only one strike has been organized with the support of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF). Founded in January 1957, ETUF was designed to control the labour movement rather than to represent workers’ interests, in exchange for a number of economic and social benefits. The Free Officers’ regime that took power in 1952 prevented the formation of an independent labour and trade union movement, but in December 1952 and April 1953 it adopted a series of laws that granted significant material gains to workers: free transport and medical care, restriction of dismissals and an increased number of paid leave days. These measures, particularly those granting job security, helped the Nasserist regime secure the support of many workers and union leaders (Beinin and Lockman 1992: 444, 446). Economic and political rewards have been seen as ‘aristocratic privileges’ deterring labour from the political role that it could otherwise play, by encouraging trade union leaders to maintain a ‘cozy relationship with the state’ in order to ensure that their interests remain protected (Bellin 2000).

ETUF should not be seen as an organization that has always been uniformly submissive to the state’s policies. Its leadership, for example, was largely opposed to the privatization policies of the 1980s that undermined the benefits that public sector workers enjoyed. As a result it was given more prerogatives in decision-making processes. The close relationship between ETUF and the state continued unabated, however. In fact, far from weakening the regime’s ability to control organized labour or to ‘expand the political space that labour institutions enjoy’, as argued by Paczyńska (2009: 30), limited state concessions further enabled co-optation. The ETUF remained largely unaccountable to its members and its strategy focused mainly on direct negotiations with government officials.

The trade union Law 35 of 1976 legalizes and protects the ETUF monopoly on trade unionism by prohibiting the formation of other trade unions. While the Labour Law of 2003 legalized strikes, it also mandated that all industrial actions be approved by the ETUF Executive Committee. This occurred only once, in 2009, when a strike was held at the Tanta Flax Company, a state company, which had been privatized in 2005.

Given the limited representation channels available, workers in the workplace adopted a different strategy from the ETUF leadership by going on strike despite the hostility of their trade union representatives. This process started in the 1980s in the context of economic reform, and then intensified beginning in the early 2000s. It resulted from a split between statist labour, whose existence relied on a ‘cozy relationship with the state’, and mobilized labour, whose interests were no longer represented by the trade union. Recognizing this distinction is important to providing a nuanced account of the limitations of state–labour relations and to examining the tension between trade union representatives and workers. Statist labour continued to benefit from corporatist policies by retaining its positions of power, and in turn it remained hostile to any attempts from workers to voice their grievances through labour actions. By doing so, the ETUF lost much of its power and influence among Egyptian workers.

In 2006, trade union elections were held to designate members of trade union committees in workplaces. Although fraud had been a feature of previous trade union elections, in 2006 it was reported to have been particularly high (Dar al-Khadamat al-Niqabiyya wa-l-‘Umaliyya 2011; Clément 2007). The fraud was aimed at purging the local trade union committees of their most militant members on the one hand, and was designed to keep the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in check on the other.⁴ This clearly exposed the gap between statist and mobilized labour and the failure of a strategy that some labour activists had followed for many years. This strategy consisted in using the ETUF as the framework through which to advance workers’ claims with the aim of reforming trade union representation from within the structures of power.

On 7 December 2006, a few weeks after the announcement of the trade union election results, the Egypt Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla went on strike to ask for the payment of a bonus that had been announced by the Prime Minister at the time, Ahmad Nazif. Workers were granted their bonus after a three-day strike and occupation of the factory during which workers’ representatives negotiated with the company management and government officials from the ministries of investment and labour.

In Mahalla and in other factories, the fraud during the 2006 trade union elections had exacerbated workers’ distrust of the union system by exposing its collusion with the management against workers’ demands. The fraud had contributed to closing the meagre channels of expressio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Connecting players and process in revolutionary Egypt
• Part I Contesting authority, making claims: Inside Egypt
• Part II Contesting authority, making claims: At the interface
• Part III Reactions and recalibrations: Beyond Egypt
• Index