Egyptian Textile Workers Confront the New Economic Order
Joel Beinin and Hossam el-Hamalawy
Middle East Report
March 25, 2007
Joel Beinin, a contributing editor of Middle East Report, is director of Middle East studies at the American University in Cairo. Hossam el-Hamalawy is a Cairo-based journalist and blogger.
For the last ten years Muhammad ‘Attar, 36, has worked in the finishing department at the gigantic Misr Spinning and Weaving Company complex at Mahalla al-Kubra in the middle of the Nile Delta. He takes home a basic wage of about $30. With profit sharing and incentives, his net pay is about $75 a month. His 33-year-old wife, Nasra ‘Abd al-Maqsoud al-Suwaydi, makes about $70 a month working in the ready-made clothing division of the same firm.
These wages are barely adequate to feed, house, clothe and pay for obligatory after-school private lessons for their three sons: Magdi (age 12), ‘Umar (age 10) and ‘Ali (age 5). The ‘Attar family income is nearly double the absolute poverty line of $975 a year for a family of five in an urban zone of the Nile Delta, but well below both the upper and lower international poverty lines set by the World Bank.[1]
Sayyid Habib began working at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in 1964, when he was 18. After 44 years of service, he earns a basic wage of about $40 a month plus profit sharing and incentives.
Workers like ‘Attar and Habib tolerate such low wages because the Misr firm is part of Egypt’s large public sector. Manual workers and white-collar employees in the public sector have jobs for life and the right to a pension equal to 80 percent of their salary at retirement. Since 2004, however, the Egyptian government has renewed its drive to privatize the textile industry. Workers fear that the new investors, many of them from India, will not provide them with the job security or the benefits they and other public-sector workers have enjoyed since most textile mills, along with other large and medium-sized enterprises in all sectors of the economy, were nationalized in the early 1960s under Gamal Abdel Nasser. These fears have led to an unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes, which, since late 2004, have been centered in the textile sector, but have spread to other industries as well. In late 2006 and 2007, the strike wave has reached a particularly high crest.
Since the enactment of Egypt’s Unified Labor Law of 2003, it has technically been legal for workers to strike, but only if approved by the leadership of the General Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions. Since the federation, along with the sectoral general unions and most enterprise-level union committees, are firmly in the grip of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), all actual strikes since 2003 have been “illegal.”
Muhammad ‘Attar and Sayyid Habib were among the leaders of a December 2006 strike at Misr Spinning and Weaving, one of the most militant and politically significant in the current strike wave. This upsurge of labor collective action has occurred amidst the broader political ferment that began in December 2004 with taboo-breaking demonstrations targeting President Husni Mubarak personally, demanding that he not run for reelection in 2005 (he did) and that his son, Gamal, not succeed him as president. An amendment to the constitution permitting the first-ever multi-candidate presidential election generated expectations that the 2005 presidential and parliamentary elections would be fair and democratic. These hopes were frustrated. Nonetheless, a wide swathe of the public, which is mostly engrossed in trying to earn a living, began to take notice of politics.
With the election of 88 Muslim Brothers in 2005, Egypt’s normally sleepy Parliament acquired a substantial opposition bloc that has exerted continual pressure on the regime. Inexperienced in handling serious public debate, the regime has begun to crack down viciously on all manner of dissenters—from Muslim Brothers to bloggers and journalists. The passage of a second round of constitutional amendments in March 2007 will make it much more difficult for independents and Muslim Brothers to run for political office and permanently allow abusive police practices that have been nominally illegal or permissible only under the “temporary” state of emergency in force since 1981.
Even before the regime’s crackdown, there was a marked decline in the activity of the well-known Kifaya movement and other extra-parliamentary forms of opposition. But the wave of strikes and other forms of working-class collective action continues unabated. It represents the most substantial and broad-based kind of resistance to the regime—one that must be handled very delicately if Husni Mubarak hopes to maintain the “stability” he needs to pass the presidency on to his son, as most Egyptians are convinced he seeks to do.
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