Where Are The Unions?

Workers and Social Movements in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe

Doctor Sian Lazar, Doctor Sian Lazar

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783609918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The start of the twenty-first century has been marked by global demands for economic justice. From the pink tide and Arab spring to Occupy and anti-austerity, the last twenty years have witnessed the birth of a new type of mass mobilisation. Where Are The Unions? compares, for the first time, the challenges faced by movements in Latin America, the Arab world and Europe. Workers' strikes and protests were a critical part of these events, yet their role has been significantly underestimated in many of the subsequent narratives. This book focuses on the complex interactions between organised workers, the unemployed, self-employed, youth, students and the state, and critically assesses the concept of the 'precariat'. With contributions from across four continents, this is the most comprehensive look at the global context of mass mobilisation in the twenty-first century.

PART ONE

LABOUR MOVEMENTS, SOCIETY AND THE STATE

1 | THE EGYPTIAN WORKERS’ MOVEMENT: PROBLEMS OF ORGANISATION AND POLITICS

Anne Alexander and Mostafa Bassiouny

The role of organised workers in the 2011 revolution in Egypt has generally received less attention from researchers than that played by youth activists, or the technologies they used to communicate. However, from the 18-day uprising that culminated in the downfall of Mubarak, to the mass mobilisations two years later against Mohamed Morsi, collective action in the workplaces was a crucial element in making Egypt at least temporarily ungovernable. The pre-history of these massive waves of strikes, sit-ins and other forms of workers’ protest has also been little explored. Yet the revival of working-class self-organisation in Egypt since the mid-2000s is in many ways a remarkable feat. Since that date, a qualitative change in the composition and activity of the workers’ movement has taken place, in fact it is arguable that the ‘workers’ movement’ as a movement revived or was reconstituted. Workers had, of course, engaged in various forms of collective action over the previous decades, and working-class activists engaged in political and social action in different arenas (including the lower levels of the state-controlled trade union federation and through their affiliation with a variety of political currents). However, there were no independent workers’ organisations of any significant size or influence, and the episodic set-piece battles within the public sector over wages or conditions left residues of personal networks and collective memories, but little that was directly usable for the next generation of activists. Moreover, these struggles took place in the context of an accelerating programme of neoliberal restructuring, which until the mid-2000s had barely been challenged by organised workers, let alone suffered any serious setbacks as a result of their collective action.

The strike wave that began in 2004–2005 and was transformed by the historic victory of textile workers in Mahalla in December 2006, was one of the factors that changed this picture. For the first time in generations, it did create the conditions for independent trade union organisation to at least temporarily mark out a space for the revival of the workers’ movement as an independently organised social actor. Combined with other factors, in particular the rising curve of political discontent with the Mubarak regime that exploded in the revolutionary crisis of 2011, the strike wave also showed the potential for organised workers to become independent political actors on a scale few had imagined since the 1940s and early 1950s. The power of this potential dynamic of reciprocal action between the social and political aspects of workers’ collective action was demonstrated by the role played by the strike wave that erupted in the last week of the uprising of 2011 and continued for several weeks afterwards, playing a critical role in securing a limited victory over the regime. Subsequent strike waves also helped to destabilise the post-Mubarak military council regime, and the government led by Mohamed Morsi who took office as president in 2012.

Yet there remains a fundamental contradiction between the power of the workers’ movement and its political impact. This is not merely a serious issue, but practically a defining characteristic of the movement. In particular the successful counter-revolution of July 2013, which led to the restoration of direct military rule, exposed the political weaknesses of the workers’ movement. Leading activists in the independent unions endorsed the Tamarod (Rebellion) campaign agitating for popular protests against Mohamed Morsi on 30 June 2013. In the wake of his overthrow by the military on 3 July, Kamal Abu Aita, president of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), was appointed Minister of Labour. Yet the Armed Forces, led by Minister of Defence Abdelfattah al-Sisi, were able to assert their dominance over the mass movement in the streets with frightening speed.

The Minister of Defence, Abdelfattah al-Sisi, demanded a ‘mandate’ from the streets to ‘crush terrorism’, by which he meant impunity to use massacres, torture and mass arrests to break the Muslim Brotherhood’s resistance to his coup.1 The state quickly turned on workers who took strike action, sending in troops against steel workers in Suez in August 2013. Within a year it was clear that the project of neoliberal reforms that had been temporarily disrupted by the uprising in 2011 was back on track, despite continuing waves of strikes and workers’ protests. Sisi’s regime was able to push through fuel subsidy cuts and austerity measures in 2014. By early 2015, even the privatisation programme, which had ground to a halt in 2011 as a result of workers’ protests and the popular uprising, had been revived.

In this chapter we argue that the independent workers’ movement that has emerged in Egypt since the mid-2000s is shaped by interlocking weaknesses in organisation and politics, which combine to stunt its overall ability to make significant gains at either a social or political level. In terms of trade union organisation, the movement suffers from a contradiction between strong and relatively resilient organisation in the workplaces and weak, competing bureaucracies at a national level. However, the movement also faces problems of political organisation: it has been unable to translate strength in workplace-based struggles into the enforcement of collective social or political demands in the national political arena. The battle over the national minimum wage is a case in point: it took six years to win even the partial implementation of demands that were first raised on a major scale in 2008.

The ruling party’s machine: the Egyptian Trade Union Federation

The decade before the uprising of 2011 saw the first major changes in the organisational composition of the Egyptian workers’ movement for nearly 50 years, with the founding of the first independent trade unions since the formation of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) in the 1950s. However, it was only with the downfall of Mubarak and the subsequent disorientation and paralysis of the old regime that independent trade unions formed in large numbers, and independent union federations emerged to challenge ETUF for the organisational leadership of the workers’ movement on a national scale.

The Egyptian Trade Union Federation dominated trade union work since its foundation by Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1957. It was completely dependent on the state, and played no role in the development or organisation of the workers’ movement. On the contrary it took a position in opposition to workers’ strikes and protests. The formation of the first independent union in 2008 was thus an important step on the route to breaking the monopoly of the state over trade union work, and began to fill the organisational vacuum in the heart of the workers’ movement.

The important role within the Nasserist regime played by ETUF continued under his successors, despite their abandonment of many of his other policies. The federation policed the Nasserist social contract – where workers were expected to abandon any claims to independent political expression in return for a range of social goods, such as job security, stable wages, access to health, education and welfare – both in the workplace and in wider society through interventions in elections on behalf of the ruling party. Despite the fact that the federation played almost no role in representing workers’ grievances to the regime, it claimed to speak on their behalf, not only in the workplace, but in the national political arena.

This role developed early in ETUF’s history, reflecting the Nasserist regime’s consolidation of a one-party model of politics with the creation of the Arab Socialist Union. After 1962, membership of the trade unions was conditional on membership of the ruling party. Even after Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, moved towards a very limited form of pluralism after 1977, the ETUF bureaucracy continued to be dominated by the ruling party. Despite the emergence of a legal left-wing party, the National Progressive Unionist Party (Al-Tagammu’), the ETUF leadership remained the almost exclusive preserve of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). The ETUF and Ministry of Labour were also deeply intertwined: until the mid-1980s the Minister of Labour was ETUF president and after that date the post was frequently given as a reward to senior trade union leaders.

The ETUF also oversaw the electoral quota system, by providing documentation for candidates running for the reserved ‘worker’ parliamentary seats.2 The process was skewed against critics of the regime: anyone wishing to run as an independent candidate or for a party other than the NDP in the 2010 elections had to wait until after the 3,500 members of the NDP had received their nomination documents.3 The 2010 elections reversed the limited but significant gains made by the Muslim Brotherhood in the electoral arena in 2005. That year the regime had somewhat relaxed its grip on the electoral process, with the result that for the first time the MB won a substantial number of seats. Although officially banned, the Brotherhood won 88 seats, 34 of them with ‘worker’ candidates under the quota system. Most of these victories were concentrated in major urban areas: seven of the Brotherhood’s nine MPs in Cairo were workers, for example.4

By the eve of the 2011 uprising, the model of workplace and political organisation that ETUF represented was in severe crisis, however. This crisis had two principal roots. First, the adoption...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the editor
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One
• 1 | The Egyptian workers’ movement: problems of organisation and politics
• 2 | From the grassroots to the presidential palace: Evo Morales and the coca growers’ union in Bolivia
• 3 | The labour union movement and ‘alternative’ culture in Tunisia: the long view of a close relationship
• Part Two
• 4 | Migrants’ struggles? Rethinking citizenship, anti-racism and labour precarity through migration politics in Italy
• 5 | The Spanish crisis: from complacency to unrest, from unrest to mobilisation
• 6 | What are the possible strategies for the emergence of a democratic and revolutionary labour movement in Lebanon?
• 7 | ‘To struggle is also to teach’: how can teachers and teaching unions further the global fight for another world?
• Part Three
• 8 | ‘Ungrievable’ labour and ‘unruly’ politics: NGOs, workers’ rights, and the 2013–2014 protests in Brazil
• 9 | The experience of grassroots syndicalism in Greece: workplace restructuring and the role of traditional trade unions in the tertiary sector
• 10 | Dilemmas of trade unionism and the movement of the unemployed under neoliberal and progressive regimes in Argentina
• 11 | From invisible to invincible: the story of the 3 Cosas Campaign
• Afterword: bringing manifestos back in?
• About the contributors
• Index