Women Textile Workers in Egypt Rally for Rights

Veteran labor communicator Ray Abernathy is traveling in Egypt, where he is meeting with workers to hear their struggles for justice and sending dispatches to AFL-CIO Now.

In the recent “winter of labor discontent” in Egypt, there were more than 250 strikes, work stoppages and sit-ins involving some 250,000 workers. But according to journalist Jano Charbel, none was more dramatic than a sleep-in by female workers at a textile plant in the Nile Delta.

The plant had been 60 percent privatized to Indonesian and Indian investors, who were threatening to cut production. The wages of the workers, mainly women, had been frozen for 10 years at 150 pounds a month (about $30 U.S. dollars). Many were about to lose their jobs.

After their shift ended, the women in their veils staged a sleep-in with their babies.  The company agreed to continue production, with no workers to be laid off and wages would not be lowered.  Six workers who had been fired were returned to work.

According to another journalist, Hossam el–Hamalawy, the labor uprisings were “sparked by frustrated workers,” not by any outside forces, and women were prime leaders of the movement.

Writing last March in Middle East Report, el-Hamalawy described how women among the 24,000 workers at Mahalla al-Kubra’s Misr Spinning and Weaving Complex instigated the first strike last December by stopping their machines and marching over to where the men were still working, chanting, “Where are the men?  Here are the women.” (Read this inspiring report here.)

Charbel and el-Hamalawy, who is also a fiery blogger (www.Arabawy.org), both were born in Cairo and at age 30 are part of an aggressive new independent press corps credited with creating unprecedented media coverage that helped spread the strikes.

El-Hamalawy says:

What was different about these strikes was that they were bigger, more widespread, and around issues that could be generalized.  Each strike was a model for the next.

El-Hamalawy adds that among the common issues were delayed bonuses, increasing privatization of all Egyptian industries, an uproar over serious irregularities with union elections and local working conditions. Government response to the strikes was restrained, he says, because Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is trying to pave the way for his son to succeed him, and a constitutional amendment to aid that succession was coming up in March.

El-Hamalawy says “government was going through a critical stage and an increasingly independent press also helped,” adding that press coverage let other workers know they could win after the first four-day strike yielded the promised bonuses, increases in food allowances and some medical services.

Charbel covered the union elections in 2006 and reported that, according the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) monitoring the elections, “they were the most foul in history.”

More than 12,000 people were barred from becoming candidates, among them members of parties opposed to the government, members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even people who just wore beards.  Then there were many cases of outright vote rigging and voter fraud.

Workplace trade union committees and 23 general unions, representing various trades, are all affiliated to the only legally recognized trade union center in Egypt, the Egypt Trade Union Federation (ETUF).

No strike has ever been authorized by the ETUF, membership is mandatory and dues are one to two pounds per month, part of which goes into strike funds workers have never been able to use. Most taxi drivers are unionized and every three years when they renew their licenses they have to cough up several hundred pounds.

In its 2006 survey of trade union rights, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (the ICFTU, which later merged with the World Confederation of Labor to become the International Trade Union Confederation) gave this summary of Egypt’s restrictions on freedom of association, as outlined in ILO Core Conventions 87 and 98:

The government continues to keep close control over the ETUF, which in turn exercises control over its affiliated national industrial federations. Legal recognition is only granted to unions which belong to those federations.

Professional workers in Egypt are not members of  ETUF, but belong to their own professional associations. Historically, the Egyptian government has not exercised the same degree of interference in the operation of the professional associations, which include journalists, engineers, doctors and lawyers. So these professional associations have been vocal over the years on political, economic and social issues. The success of blue collar workers in the trade unions has added more “fuel” to the already active professionals. Just this week, 25,000 teachers employed by El Azhar, a nationwide public school system, walked out because they were left out of pay adjustments that were part of a government decree outlawing private tutoring.

El-Hamalawy contrasts the Egyptian union movement with the U.S. movement when he wryly observes:

A big difference between here and the U.S. is that your people are trapped within the boundaries of legalism.  Here, every strike is illegal.

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