Textile strike clampdown – a sign of repressive times in Egypt

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By Deena Gamil

1 March 2017

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Labour Egypt Labour rights Strikes Democracy Trade unions Repression

Workers at Egypt’s Misr Spinning and Weaving Company were forced to end a two day strike on 8 February, due to the arrest of five female workers and threats not only to increase the number of arrests, but also to fire striking workers.

Around 3,000 textile workers at the el-Ghazl factory, which is located in the Egyptian industrial city of el-Mahalla el-Kubra, went on strike to demand the payment of benefits.

“We are entitled to a 600 Egyptian pounds (around US$ 33) development bonus [editor’s note: one of several bonuses paid to public sector workers to compensate for their low basic salary], but we are only getting EGP 360 (around US$ 19),” said a female worker at el-Ghazl who spoke to Equal Times on the condition of anonymity. “Some of our colleagues have won court orders to force the company to pay them the EGP 600, but they have not yet been implemented,” she explained.

Misr Spinning and Weaving Company is one of the biggest textile companies in Egypt. It employs over 20,000 workers in eight factories, and falls under the authority of the government-run Cotton and Textiles Holding Company.

Ever since the rule of Hosni Mubarak, Misr workers have played an important role in the labour movement in Egypt.

In December 2006, el-Ghazl workers went on strike, inspiring worker action across the country in response to low pay, the high cost of living and market reforms. And in April 2008, a strike at Misr Spinning and Weaving Company is widely considered as the precursor to the fall of President Mubarak in February 2011.

In 2013, the government introduced new laws restricting protests and strikes in Egypt, which has resulted in the imprisonment of thousands of people.

Since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took power in 2014, all forms of protest – including strikes – have been repressed. According to the Human Rights Watch World Report 2017, “Security forces routinely tortured detainees and forcibly disappeared hundreds of people during 2016.”

Still waiting for ‘Bread, Freedom and Social Justice’

Against this backdrop, the textile workers bravely continued with demands. In addition to the development bonus, they also called for a 10 per cent increase to their basic salaries and an increase of the nutrition allowance from EGP 3 daily to EGP 10, to compensate for soaring inflation rates and the huge rise in food prices.

The annual inflation rate for January 2017 amounted to 29.6 per cent, according to the official CAPMAS statistics agency, which is the highest rise in the consumer price index since November 1986.

Although ‘Bread, Freedom and Social Justice’ was the rallying cry of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, all three remain illusive. Prices have soared since Egypt devaluated its pound last November.

The value of the Egyptian pound has roughly halved and urban consumer price inflation has doubled from 13.6 percent last October.

“It is now extremely difficult to make ends meet. We hardly eat any meat, dairy, or fruits,” the el-Ghazl worker said. “Some of us are working two jobs, but we are still struggling to survive,” she added.

In response to Egypt’s deteriorating economic conditions, a number of trade unions, civil society organisations, political parties and political movements launched the “We Want to Live” campaign in December 2016.

According to the founding statement of the campaign it aims to “face the fierce and unprecedented attack on the living conditions of the toiling masses” by mobilising around the introduction of a decent wage for all workers, the rights of independent trade unions, pensions and social security and better healthcare provisions.

At a conference held in Cairo in January, the campaign also accused the government of President Sisi of “siding with top businessmen and using oppressive tactics against any labour movement, including putting [their members] on trial and banning independent unions.”

Latest attack

The repression facing workers at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company is just the latest attack on workers’ rights in Egypt. In January, for example, 19 striking workers from the IFFCO oils and soap factory in Suez were arrested and charged with inciting a strike and halting production. The charges were later dropped.

In September 2016, leaders of the Cairo Bus Workers’ Union were arrested. Five members are currently appealing a two-year prison sentence and fines of EGP100,000 (approximately US$6200) related to a strike in 2014.

And in May 2016, workers at the Alexandria Shipyard Company were arrested and detained for demanding better pay and health and safety measures. Because the company is under the administration of the Ministry of Defence, the workers are currently being tried in a military court.

At Misr Spinning and Weaving Company, the company union did not support the strike, according to the female worker. “None of them [union reps] approached the striking workers to listen to their demands,” she said.

But a member of the company union, who also spoke to Equal Times on condition of anonymity, said this is because “the workers are not entitled to the things they are demanding. The 10 per cent raise has not been approved yet,” he said.

However, he did say that the unions had been doing work behind the scenes, including writing a letter to the company management, to urge them to find the resources to pay for the development bonuses. He said the union was particularly focused on finding a solution through negotiation because “things now are different –anyone who protests might be arrested.”

Atmosphere of fear

Public sector trade union leader Fatma Ramadan says that an atmosphere of fear has underpinned all recent industrial action. “Arrests, references to trial and dismissal are tools used now by the state apparatus to suppress workers’ protests without fulfilling their demands,” she told Equal Times. The government is being particular tough on workers and trade unions because of the impact strikes can have – particularly with the deteriorating economic conditions.

“Repression is how the government reacts to political, social, and economic demands. The lack of militant workers’ organisations makes it harder for workers to hold out, so recently most protests are defeated,” Ramadan added.

The 2016 murder of Giulio Regeni, an Italian student who had been conducting research into Egyptian street vendors, drew worldwide condemnation and is considered as yet more evidence of the extreme repression facing the labour movement in Egypt.

For Egypt’s independent trade unions, things need to change. “Conventional methods of resistance are not enough anymore. We need more creative and effective methods of resistance to rise amongst the workers facing state repression,” Ramadan concluded.

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# On 2 March 2017 at 10:45, By Dr. Gary K. Busch

Challenges To Egyptian Labour
Gary K. Busch 18/1/15

Thousands of Egyptian textile workers have been on strike since the 16th of January in Egypt’s largest textile mill at Mahalla el-Kubra in the heart of the Nile Delta. They have gone on strike against the Misr Company for Spinning and Weaving in a dispute over bonuses. They are also protesting against the government’s recent decision to scrap cotton subsidies as part of the austerity program.

Strikes in Mahalla have historically set the tone for the country’s class politics in a political movement with a long history and tradition in Egypt. The development of Egyptian unionism has been shaped by its bitter conflict with the Egyptian military and its governments. Egyptian unions operate almost entirely in the public sector. In Egypt today, one-third of the economy is run by parastatal companies under the direct control of the government and the ministries. Another third belongs to the Army, which owns factories, construction companies, arms manufacturers, banks, stock brokers and the bulk of the tourist industry. These two sectors are symbiotic and have virtual monopolies in their respective sectors. Day to day administration is left to hired managers. The ‘owners’ of these two-thirds of the economy are essentially ‘rentier capitalists’; that is a type of capitalism where their earnings are gained from interest, fees, profits and rents on property they own but do not manage. They are the property-owning social class which benefit from their ownership of these assets but do not contribute to the economy by any direct actions of their own. Marx called them ‘social parasites’.

The remaining third of the Egyptian economy is mostly composed of subsistence farmers as well as small shopkeepers and professionals (doctors, lawyers) and small engineering firms. The rules governing this private sector are very bureaucratic. The private economy has no access to credit, no development capacity, and it creates few professional opportunities. Further, 92 per cent of Egyptians have no legal title for their dwellings, and Egyptian law makes it all but impossible for such people to obtain credit. To open, say, a bakery, a would-be entrepreneur must endure 500 days of administrative procedures, with bureaucratic corruption involved at each step”

Egypt is not a prosperous country despite its growing oil sector. It imports around US $50.3 billion worth of goods every year and exports US $ 25.2 billion a year. It is the largest grain importer in the world and requires massive sums of foreign aid to sustain its citizens. Egypt is one of the U.S.’s largest markets for wheat sales. U.S. agricultural sales to Egypt average $2 billion annually above and beyond the US$ 1.3 billion in U.S. military aid to the country. After the reforms of 2006 and 2007 the Egyptian economy experienced steady GDP growth with rates around 7% between 2005 and 2008, before dropping below 5% amidst the global economic crisis. Despite Egypt’s growth, the economy is still hampered by government intervention, substantial subsidies for food, housing, and energy, and bloated public sector payrolls.

This is not an ideal situation in which trades unions thrive. There are few large, unionized private companies. Most of the industrial companies (spinning and weaving cotton, ports and canal operations, airline, transport of all sorts, steel making, etc.) are owned and operated by the state or the Army. In addition, the wide range of public service workers in schools, hospitals, the civil service, etc., are all state employees. This has meant that wages and working conditions of those employed in the public sector (about 87% of the Egyptian workforce) are negotiated with a governmental entity or department. The collective bargaining partner of the Egyptian unions is the State. For thirty years or more, the State has been the Army. This has had some important effects on the labour movement
The role of Egyptian labour in such a corporatist state has posed many challenges. Since the ascension of Gamal Abdel Nasser as the head of state, the labour movements have been seen by the Army as an instrument of the state with the responsibility for maintaining discipline in the workplace and increasing productivity. Unions were not permitted to exert any real pressure for shorter hours or higher wages in any specific industry as wages and benefits were established on a national, and occasionally regional, level. There was a flow of top labour leaders into the ranks of the ruling party and militancy was not encouraged.

Trade unions, or similar bodies, were regarded as administrative arms of the state, charged with the primary responsibility of maintaining discipline and furthering productivity. They were not permitted to exert any real pressure for shorter hours or higher wages.

Perhaps the best example of this was a strike that broke out in the village of Kafr al-Dawwar less than a month after the Free Officers’ coup in 1952. It set the tone for the relationship. The workers at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company, one of Egypt’s largest industrial establishments at the time, staged a sit-in over a series of economic and job-related issues. Troops were called in, and the violence which ensued resulted in the deaths of four workers, two soldiers, and one policeman, with many others wounded on both sides. The RCC (the ruling military council) ordered a military tribunal and tried twenty-nine workers on charges including premeditated murder, arson, property destruction, and refusal to obey police. Two workers, Mustafa Khamis and Muhammad al-Baqari, were convicted of being communists who had incited the incident and were sentenced to death; eleven others received penalties of jail or hard labour. The workers of Mahalla have been the bellwether of industrial action in Egypt.

The 1980s and mid-1990s were relatively uneventful for the Egyptian labour movement. The Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), the sole ‘national centre’, enjoyed a monopoly position as the representative of labour. Until recently, it was the practice for the head of ETUF to also hold, simultaneously, the position of minister of Manpower and Vocational Training in the government. Now the minister is chosen from among the presidents of the constituent national unions. This created a close relationship between government and the union leadership. There were no ideological divisions at the leadership level of the labour movement. However, the unions were surrounded by government regulation and could not operate freely. There were twenty-three national unions, based primarily on separate industries, and all were required to affiliate with ETUF. Strikes were forbidden by law, and collective bargaining was permitted only in the private sector and then only on nonwage issues. Labour disputes were resolved by the courts. There had occasional strikes but to lead one was dangerous because of a law stipulating life terms at hard labour for strikers who threaten the national economy.

As a result of pressures by the labour movement and from outside political organisations there were some major changes grudgingly introduced in 2009 and 2010. Despite the escalating strikes over 2009 and 2010, there were few victories: most of them were either ignored by the government or brutally broken and suppressed. The rare and slim victories were largely due to the sheer tenacity of the protesters. They got the government to raise the minimum wage to 400 Egyptian pounds (about $70) per month, nearly four times what it had been but hardly enough to address the rising inflation costs. They also successfully formed two independent trade unions and an independent trade union federation; an unprecedented break from the suffocating hold the government had exercised over labour activism since 1957.

The trigger was another strike at Mahalla. The January 25, 2011 protests that began the current stage of the social revolt grew out of the support given by the youthful leadership of the April 6 movement for the April 2008 strikes at Mahalla al-Kubra. In Mahalla, 25,000 workers went on strike amidst deteriorating standards of living as the prices of basic foodstuffs careened upwards. The workers won their demands - their strike was the crest of a massive wave of labour unrest that has hit Egypt hard since 1998. Between 1998 and 2008, two million Egyptian workers participated in over 2,600 factory occupations. In the first five months of 2009, over 200 industrial actions took place, a trend that continued through 2010.

This escalating growth of labour militancy did not occur in a vacuum. It was aided, in part, by support from several political parties who were dissatisfied at operating under Emergency Powers which superseded the constitution and with the rise in prices in the economy, especially foodstuffs. Egypt is a republic, established in 1922 and operated (before the new Constitution) under a Constitution passed in 1971. There was an executive president, a prime minister and an appointed cabinet. The legislature is the People’s Assembly (444 elected and 10 presidentially appointed members - an additional 64 seats for women were created in 2009) lower house and a Shura (consultative) Council (176 elected members, 88 presidentially appointed) as the upper house. The principal political parties were the National Democratic Party (the ruling party) and the opposition parties: New Wafd Party, Al Ghad Party, Democratic Front Party, National Progressive Unionist Grouping (Tagammau), the Moslem Brotherhood and a Nasserite Party.

However, with the ouster by the Army of the Moslem Brotherhood and the elevation of Abdel Fattah el-Size to the Presidency, power lies once again with the Army and the General Intelligence Directorate (GID- Gihaz al-Mukhabarat al-Amma), often called the Mukhabarat. The eyes and ears of the Mukhabarat are everywhere in Egypt with informers and agents in virtually every political and economic movement. It has maintained the ‘stability’ of the military regime and kept a close eye on the other military cadres in case of dissatisfaction. It is the most powerful group in the country and has been the interface between Egypt and the US, the EU, the Arab League and Israel. When the various foreign powers speak of promoting democracy and free elections in Egypt, the unspoken end of the sentence is “and the continued co-operation with the Mukhabarat to ensure stability and our mutual interests”.

There are several problems which are facing Egyptian unions. The structure of the economy has not really changed. The state and the army still control around two-thirds of the economy and the unions have to deal with their hired managers and the civil servants. Unions perform two functions on behalf of their members, especially in negotiations. The first is to represent the “interests” of their members (wages, working conditions, pensions, etc.) In representing these interests they must deal with the basic enabling labour legislation and with the economic powers and programs of an entire state. The other task of unions is to represent the workers “rights”. In reality the representation of the worker’s rights (making sure that what has been agreed is fulfilled; grievance procedures et al) is the major part of trade union work.

The representation of “interests” often puts the labour movement in conflict with other political and economic groups who are competing for a larger share of the national pie and who see the labour movement, representing people at work and relatively well-off, as competitors with the very poor and destitute and the unemployed. On the other hand, the representation of workers’ rights is usually a force which allies the labour movement with political forces trying to achieve political and social changes and who value the additional pressure the labour movement can bring. This is why the current strike at Mahalla is so important.
The textile mill continued to witness sporadic strikes after the revolution - the last of which was in February 2014, also over the national minimum wage. More important was the workers’ demand to purge the management ranks of Mubarak-era officials, blamed by workers for the decline of the company. This did not succeed. The current strike is not as strong as the previous ones - at least not yet. This time they are not staging a sit-in, like before, where thousands of strikers and their families moved to the factory, setting up tents and barricades, and in effect occupying the work floor. Not this time. They are too weak for a direct confrontation.

The strike is taking place in a time of defeat for the mass movement that spearheaded the 25 January revolution. Sisi’s crackdown on dissent in the wake of the sporadic uprisings of the remaining Moslem Brotherhood supporters has dealt a crushing blow to street politics and industrial militancy.

Sisi’s crackdown on dissent using his military arsenal, security forces and draconian legislative decrees, amid an atmosphere of government-manufactured paranoia thanks to its "war on terror", has created a climate of hesitation and trepidation among political and labour militants. The workers are playing it safe. The workers, mostly from the morning shift, go to the mill in the early hours, but lay down their tools, stopping production. A few marches have been held in the compound, but these have been tiny compared with the mass rallies the company usually witnesses during industrial actions. They are also taking the precaution of chanting their support of Sisi during the marches, limiting the ceiling of criticism to Prime Minister Ibrahim Mahlab.

Another difficulty is that the strike leadership is not unified; although this is not unusual. It is rare that labour organisers at the factory have been united - due to a long history of complicated factory politics and ideological and personal feuds. But even with a divided factory floor, organisers miraculously coordinated the February 2014 strike with seven other textile companies.

The ongoing strike in Mahalla comes on the heels of another stoppage in Helwan’s steel mill, south of Cairo - another historical hotbed of industrial militancy. Those two strikes, and sporadic others, do not yet pose a real threat to Sisi’s regime; but they remain the last remaining area of dissent of the revolutionary movement.
Despite the harshness of the Sisi regime the Egyptian unionists recognise that it represents their most likely chance of improving the economic stagnation of the Egyptian economy. So far, however, Sisi has needed to deploy draconian measures to keep control even at his moment of peak popularity. He has outlawed demonstrations. He has imprisoned tens of thousands, many for the simple offense of protesting. Old state security agents have returned to their old ways, humiliating dissidents by leaking their private phone calls to the media. Crackdowns target homosexuals, atheists, and blasphemers. Judges have sentenced to death hundreds of Muslim Brothers—until recently, members of an elected civilian ruling party—in shotgun trials that lasted a day or two and have made a mockery of Egypt’s once-respected judiciary. An activist from the secular April 6 Youth Movement recently had three years tacked on to his sentence because he dared ask about a Facebook page where the judge in his case had openly identified with Sisi’s regime and denigrated the revolutionaries, casting aside any pretence of judicial impartiality.

Nonetheless, the striking workers at Mahalla are following a long tradition of Egyptian militancy; a tradition that might, once again, change things for the better for their own factory and for Egyptian labour as a whole.

1. Guy Sorman, “Egypt’s Unborn Revolution”, City Journal 18/2/2011.
2. Hossam el-Hamalawy, “Textile Workers’s Strike Stirs Discontent in Sisi’s Egypt”, Al-Araby 16/1/15
3. Thannasis Kambanis, “Is Egypt On The Verge of Another Uprising”, Atlantic 16/1/15

Textile strike clampdown – a sign of repressive times in Egypt

Still waiting for ‘Bread, Freedom and Social Justice’

Latest attack

Atmosphere of fear

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