Egypt’s New Labor Movement Comes of Age
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This is a cross-post by Ben Moxham of Stronger Unions, the blog from the United Kingdom’s Trade Union Congress (TUC) on the new Egyptian trade union movement that has its roots in last year’s incredible uprising that toppled the Mubarak government.
Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, and Lisa McGowan, acting director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the Solidarity Center, participated in the historic founding Congress of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU). The Congress represented an important step forward in the struggle by Egyptian workers to form free and independent unions.
On the desert-battered outskirts of Cairo, in a kitsch marble convention center, the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU) has just announced to Egypt and the world that it has come of age. EFITU was born in the inspiration and chaos of Tahrir square, exactly 12 months to the day. Since then they have been organizing, organizing and organizing. Today was a chance to show the results and I was blown away.
The federation claims to have organized a phenomenal 2 million workers into 200 unions in barely a year. Of course, many of the new independent unions have their roots in the underground workers’ struggles throughout the past decade. And without clear ways to keep membership records, the total figure may be in doubt, but as an accurate figure emerges it will still be the single most impressive organizing effort I’ve ever come across (and this is just one of the two new independent federations: the Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress [EDLC] claims to have signed up 214 unions with a seven figure combined membership also).
Legitimacy means everything to this nascent movement. So long denied a voice in the workplace and a voice in society, they are determined to be democratic and everywhere. “We bid farewell to land-lord run unions” of Mubarak, said Kamal Abou Aita, the acting president of EFITU.
And they did so in meticulous-style: each of the 264 delegates would vote, one-by-one, walking up onto the congress stage, showing their ID, filing out their ballot and putting it in a large glass box for the entire hall to see. “How powerful is that?” I thought after the first few votes. “How long will this take?” I thought after three hours and only 140 delegates in. More hours passed and I realized that these guys have pyramid-building patience and that I’d nodded off and drooled a bit.
But by then the party had set in. Us international guests filed some dead air time by firing off our best Read the rest of this entry »
In Covanta Struggle, Utility Workers Go Global
In 2008, after some 140 workers at Covanta Energy Corp.’s Rochester, Mass., plant voted to join the Utility Workers (UWUA), the “green” energy company started a two-year-long campaign of delay, “intolerable” contract demands and other bargaining table stalls. As UWUA President Michael Langford says:
They thought we’d just go away.
Well, they didn’t go away. They went global. Now, UWUA Local 369 members in Rochester have a contract signed just last week and the union may be on the verge of winning an agreement that would allow Covanta workers at its 30 U.S. facilities, as well as its overseas operations, to choose to join a union without management interference (more below).
Colombian Activist Yessika Hoyos Receives AFL-CIO Human Rights Award
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Seven years ago, Colombian union leader Jorge Dario Hoyos was assassinated. But his death did not silence his family’s search for justice. His daughter, Yessika, followed in her father’s steps, risking her life in pursuit of workers’ rights and challenging the power of corporations and a government that does little to protect the rights and lives of workers.
Today, the AFL-CIO presented Yessika Hoyos with the 2008 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award for “her extraordinary courage, her dedication to the cause of workers’ rights in Colombia and her commitment to ending impunity for those responsible.”
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, a friend of Dario Hoyos, praised Yessica as “an incredible woman.”
As a lawyer, she has fought tirelessly to bring her father’s killers to justice and to end the cycle of violence in her native land. Even though the low-level trigger men responsible for her father’s death have been prosecuted, the masterminds who ordered Dario Hoyos’ death have not been found—an all-too-common scenario in the deadliest country in the world for union members.
