Egyptian Labor-Support Organization Banned After Strike Actions

Veteran labor communicator Ray Abernathy is traveling in Egypt, where he is meeting with workers to hear their struggles for justice. Below is Abernathy’s first dispatch from Egypt. 

CAIRO—The more than 200 strikes are over. Tens of thousands of workers are back on their jobs, after winning several small but important victories in the most widespread labor unrest in Egypt in decades. But the Center for Trade Union & Workers Services (CTUWS) is out of business, its four offices closed and its activities banned in retaliation by the Egyptian government for the role it allegedly played in sparking the workers’ protest movements and strikes.

Kamal Abbas doesn’t flinch when asked about the right to strike, as it relates to freedom of association, which is protected under International Labor Organization (ILO) Core Conventions 87 and 98. 

We did not call for the strikes, but we have programs and trainings on workers’ rights, and they have the right to strike.  We support them if they do have a strike. 

We’re meeting with Abbas, the founder and general coordinator of CTUWS, in a neat but spare office inside a crumbling-down building in the Helwan Industrial District about 20 minutes south of Cairo. Most of the walled and barbed wire factories in the district appear to be closed, their guard towers empty. The Helwan residential street we’re visiting is lined with once-grand apartment buildings, now lying in ruins as if they belonged in Beruit. Like the rest of Cairo, it’s a study in contrasts: Late-model cars are parked fender to bumper with ancient broken-down junkers. Neatly dressed men and women, some of the women in head-to-toe naqubs with their faces covered, others in Levis with shawls and only their hair covered, share the street with young boys in rags driving donkey carts piled high with produce or junk. 

Abbas, a wiry, handsome labor veteran still under 40, is dressed in a collared knit shirt, jeans and black Italian loafers. A steel worker, he led the successful strike at the Egyptian Iron Works in Heyman in 1989, when 19,000 workers walked out to gain a wage increase and a meal a day and were attacked by 10,000 riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. Abbas was jailed four times in the ensuing months. In March 1990, he and a group of labor leaders launched CTUWS, vowing to support the needs of workers (who in Egypt barely make $2 an hour) and fill the void created by government restrictions on freedom of association and employer resistance to rights of workers organizing into unions  in the private sector.  

Apparently, CTUWS succeeded all too well: On March 29, the government shut down the CTUWS office in the city of Naj Hamadi and on April 10, it closed the center’s office in Mahalla. Then on April 25, 15 police officers, backed by several hundred soldiers, surrounded the organization’s headquarters in Helwan, forced the staff into the street and shut down the office. After two hours, the same security forces shuttered a second CTUWS office in Helwan.  The Egyptian government’s actions against CTUWS are part of a general crackdown on human rights activists, civil society organizations and journalists. The right of working people to have a collective voice at  work is fundamental to a democratic society. 

The series of workers’ protest movements and strikes started in December 2006 in public-sector textile factories where wages are 446 Egyptian pounds per month (about 75 U.S. dollars). Workers were upset at the results of Egyptian government restrictions on the nominations and trade union elections process and at authorities’ refusal to implement bonuses that had been awarded but not issued. Many workers were losing their jobs as Egypt began to privatize its basic industries, and wages in private-sector factories were being forced steadily downward.

Abbas explains there was no violence against the strikers and that after two or three months, union and management began negotiations. Explaining that the worker protests were triggered by the lack of transparency in union elections and the attempt to renege on bonuses, Abbas says the workers eventually came away with the bonuses that had been promised, but little else, and that protests and strikes are continuing to crop up. 

Abbas explains that what’s needed are policies to deal with the transition of public-sector factories to the private sector, where there is no union to join whatsoever. 

We know we are living in a dictatorship, in a closed society, so we have to make demands. We are on the right track. We will come back.  

CTUWS has received a petition of support from more than 20 Egyptian civil society organizations as well as letters of support from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Public Services International, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the ILO, as well as labor organizations and unions in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and the United Kingdom. 

In its April 20 protest letter against the closure of CTUWS, the ITUC urged President Hosni Mubarak and Egyptian authorities to “rescind the restrictions and other measures imposed on the CTUWS, as a positive sign” of the govermment’s “commitment to international labor and human rights.”  

The Egyptian government has used the labor unrest as a pretext to silence organizations who are providing critical support to Egyptian workers.  Workers are not protesting in a vacuum.  Egyptian workers are protesting and launching other peaceful initiatives in response to deteriorating economic security for their families.  Workers at the Mahalla Textile factory and elsewhere have been shut out of a government-managed process to liquidate public-owned industries. 

Messages of protest and support should be directed to: His Excellency Hosni Mubarak, President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, ‘Abdin Palace, Cairo, Egypt.

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