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83 9. STRIKES IN EGYPT SPREAD FROM CENTER OF GRAVITY JOEL BEININ AND HOSSAM EL-HAMALAWY In the last decade of President Husni Mubarak’s rule, the longest and strongest wave of worker protest since the 1940s rolled through Egypt. In March of 2007, the liberal daily al-Misri al-Yawm estimated that no fewer than 222 sit-in strikes, work stoppages, hunger strikes, and demonstrations had occurred during 2006. In the first five months of 2007, the paper reported a new labor action nearly every day.The citizen group Egyptian Workers and Trade Union Watch documented fifty-six incidents during the month of April,and another fifteen during the first week of May alone.1 From their center of gravity in the textile sector, the strikes spread to mobilize makers of building materials, Cairo subway workers, garbage collectors, bakers, food processing workers,and many others.Like almost all strikes in Egypt in the preceding forty years,these work stoppages were “illegal”—unauthorized by the state-sponsored EgyptianTrade Union Federation (ETUF) and its subsidiary bodies in factories and other workplaces. But unlike upsurges of working-class collective action in the 1980s and 1990s, which were confined to state-owned industries, the wave that began in late 2004 also pushed along employees in the private sector. Around the same time the first strikes broke out, the most outspoken pro-democracy street protests in years—including in their ranks leftists and secular nationalists and sometimes Muslim Brothers—also appeared. Having spent three years trying to contain the pro-democracy ferment, the Mubarak regime launched a counterattack on the workers’ movement as well.The counterattack came as many activist workers shifted their gaze from wages, benefits and working conditions to the explicitly political question of their relation, through the ETUF, to the state. Workers and Brothers Notable among the April 2007 actions were repeated work stoppages by 284 workers at the Mansura-Spain Company, at which a 75 percent female work force produced quilts and ready-made clothes. These workers were protesting the sale of their enterprise without a commitment from the prospective new owner, the private sector bank al-Masraf al-Muttahid , to pay supplemental wages and profit shares due them since 1995. The largest private-sector strikes occurred in the coastal city of Alexandria at Arab Polvara Spinning and Weaving, a fairly successful enterprise privatized in the first tranche 84 EGYPT | STRIKES IN EGYPT SPREAD FROM CENTER OF GRAVITY of the public-sector selloff during the mid-1990s. On March 24, 2007, and again on April 2,nearly half of the firm’s twelve thousand workers struck to protest discrimination between workers and managers in the allocation of shares when the company was sold,failure to pay workers dividends on their shares,and the elimination of paid sick leave and a paid weekend. Workers last received dividends on their shares in 1997, when they were paid 60 Egyptian pounds (about $10.45 at the time). The demands of the Arab Polvara workers indicated that public-sector workers were correct to suspect that, even if privatized firms initially agreed to offer pay and benefits similar to those in the public sector (in some cases,the pay is even higher),the requirements of competing in the international market would eventually drive down wages and worsen working conditions. Since there were few trade unions in the private sector, workers lacked even the weak institutional mechanism of the state-sponsored union federation to contest the unilateral actions of private capital. The government charged the Muslim Brothers with inciting the Arab Polvara strike,but there was no evidence that they played any role in this or any other labor action that year. Labor solidarity was an unusual stance for the Brothers, who had never had a strong base in the industrial working class and, in the past, had assisted the government in breaking strikes. While some Muslim Brothers acted to encourage the spate of worker activism, it appeared there were differences within the organization between the affluent businessmen who dominated the leadership and rank-and-file members from the lower middle classes and working poor. In February 2007, the Muslim Brother MP ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Husayni announced his backing for the walkout of the Misr Spinning and Weaving workers in Kafr al-Dawwar, south of Alexandria. His parliamentary colleague Sabir Abu al-Futouh, from Alexandria, followed up by issuing several statements supporting the Arab Polvara strike. Earlier, Abu al-Futouh had been coordinator of the...

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