Egyptian Workers Build Independent Union Movement

Liz McElroy of the Philadelphia Council of the AFL-CIO, Dan Heck of Working America and Scott Reynolds of the AFL-CIO staff meet with a group of worker activists from the Egyptian Center for Trade Union and Worker Services in Cairo.

Dan Heck, Midwest regional director for Working America, recently visited Egypt as a member of a three-person delegation sponsored by the Solidarity Center. He writes about his impressions of that country’s emerging independent union movement and will follow up here with a series from his visit. To learn more about Egyptian workers’ struggles to form free, independent unions, click here, here, here, here and here.

I just returned from a 10-day trip to Egypt with the Solidarity Center. We met with some 300 Egyptian workers and trade union activists from Cairo in northern Egypt to Aswan at the southern end of the Nile.

Workers in Egypt are doing something truly remarkable. In the face of very long odds, they are organizing an independent, democratic workers’ movement, which has the potential to lift their families out of poverty and spur a new wave of democratic reform in Egypt.

Many of the workers scrape by on just a few dollars a day or less. At times it seems all of the institutions of society are stacked against them. The government colludes with corporate interests to keep their wages and benefits low, often skirting or ignoring the law. Even their official trade union movement is run by the same government and corporate interests that control the rest of society. Imagine Working America being run by conservative members of Congress and the CEO of Wal-Mart and you’ve got the right idea.

Then again, the idea of powerful political operatives and corporate interests working together to form front groups that claim to speak for working people isn’t entirely foreign to us.

When Egyptian workers attempt to form democratic and independent unions that actually fight for them, they risk arrest, harassment and sometimes torture. It was an enormous privilege to look into their eyes, hear their stories and share organizing strategies with them. In spite of the oppressive conditions, they are organizing themselves at the grassroots, leading a huge wave of strikes and activism. There have been more than 700 strikes a year for the past two years. If this remarkable surge in grassroots activism continues, we could well be witnessing the birth of a true, independent labor movement in Egypt. That, in turn, could spur broader democracy in Egypt and increase the quality of life for workers.

I was constantly impressed with the workers we met. They are articulate, informed and brave. Although the conditions they face are far more harsh than those we deal with here, the basic problems are the same: Employers often refuse to obey the law and intimidate and harass workers for attempting to exercise their basic rights. I’ll be sharing some of their stories and how they relate directly to our own experiences here in the United States in a series of upcoming posts.

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