Beinin - Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt

WORKERS AND THIEVES

Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt

JOEL BEININ

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beinin, Joel, 1948 author.

Workers and thieves : labor movements and popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt / Joel Beinin.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9804-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8047-9864-8 (electronic)

1. Labor movementTunisiaHistory. 2. Labor movementEgyptHistory. 3. Working classPolitical activityTunisiaHistory. 4. Working classPolitical activityEgyptHistory. 5. TunisiaHistoryDemonstrations, 2010 6. EgyptHistoryProtests, 2011 I. Title.

HD8784.B45 2015

961.105'2dc23

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/13 Adobe Garamond

FOR IZZIE

A JOB IS A RIGHT, YOU PACK OF THIEVES!

TUNISIA, GAFSA, 2008; SIDI BOUZID, 2010

BREAD, FREEDOM, SOCIAL JUSTICE

EGYPT, 2011 PROTESTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WORKERS, COLLECTIVE ACTION, AND POLITICS

In 2004 Kamal Abbas, the general coordinator of Egypts Center for Trade Union and Workers Services, told me, The best thing that can be done for democracy in this country is to promote the rights of workers. An upsurge of wildcat strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations, and other workers collective actions that began in the late 1990s was escalating as we spoke. But neither of us understood its full significance at that time. During the 2000s only a handful of Western journalists occasionally reported on these contestations. Inside the Beltway think-tankers almost completely disregarded them. No journalists or foreign policy experts considered these collective actions in the context of the accelerating privatization of Egypts public resources and the attendant loss of job security, social services, and workers status as productive contributors to the national economythe most common contentious issues.

Until the January 25, 2011 popular uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, most observers of contemporary Egypt focused on its putative economic and political liberalization and its role in the nonexistent Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Euro-American scholars and foundations engaged in democracy promotion and their Egyptian counterparts enthused about the

The regime of Tunisias President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, despite promises of political liberalization after he seized power on November 7, 1987, was even more repressive than Mubaraks in the 2000s. International advocacy NGOs duly documented Tunisias egregious human rights violations. But most Western Tunisia experts and political leaders expressed only pro forma concerns about them. Instead they focused on what French presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicholas Sarkozy and many others acclaimed as Tunisias economic miracle.

Tunisian workers engaged in an even larger number of strikes and collective actions than their Egyptian counterparts in the 2000s, although they are less well documented due to more severe media censorship. A six-month-long rebellion in the Gafsa phosphate-mining basin in 2008 prompted by a demand for jobs targeted both the phosphate mining company and nepotistic local officials of the national trade union federation (LUnion gnrale tunisienne du travail, UGTT), while the leadership of the phosphate miners union stood with the regime. The slogan raised in GafsaA job is a right, you pack of thieves!reappeared three years later in Sidi Bouzid and the center-west regions where the uprising that ousted Ben Ali on January 14, 2011 began.

Young cultural revolutionaries like Egypts Ramy Essam and Tunisias El General, youth groups like Egypts April 6 Youth Movement, Facebook pages like We are all Khaled Said, bloggers like Tunisias Lina Ben Mhenni and Slim Amamou and Egypts Zeinobia, and digital media like Nawaat.org were certainly factors in mobilizing the 2011 popular uprisings. However, the satellite TV channel Al Jazeera had a far larger audience and a broader impact than any digital media or radical cultural expressions. Moreover, digital media and radical cultural expressions were not the principal factors in the most intense contestations that unfolded in the decade before those uprisings.

Using the examples of Egypt and Tunisia, this book seeks to explain why the experts were wrong and Kamal Abbas was right. Workers participation in the social ferment preceding the ouster of the autocrats and in the political realignments after their demise was far more important than most observers have acknowledged. However, the role of workers cannot fully be explained by their economic grievances.

Who are the workers Kamal Abbas was referring to? Throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the terms workers (al-ummal) and working class (al-tabaqa al-amila) are commonly used and understood, although popular definitions are imprecise. Who is included in the working class, and why this is a commonly used term, depends on a complex matrix of historically forged local and national economic, political, social, and cultural relationships. Workers do not have fixed, immutable identities, universal forms of consciousness, and certainly not a predetermined historical trajectory.

Workers are free wage laborers in two respects: they are free to seek employment in the market and to accept it on the best terms available, and free of independent access to the means of production. In the MENA region wage labor is often seasonal. Some industrial and agricultural workers or their families also own or rent small plots of agricultural land. Since the early twentieth century, an important part of the North African (Maghrebi) working class has migrated to France in search of jobs that did not exist at home. Labor migration in the MENA region became widespread with the oil boom of the 1970s. Egypt has been, since then, the leading Arab labor exporter, with important consequences for the experiences and consciousness of its workers. Those employed in mechanized transport and industrial enterprises, as well as handicraft artisans and the self-employed who possess little capital other than their hand tools, have been members of trade unions and are popularly considered part of the working class.

White-collar workers are powerful actors in the Tunisian labor movement. Schoolteachers and healthcare, postal, and telecommunications workers have long been the most militant members of the UGTT. Many were radicalized during their university studies and brought their political commitments into their unions, where they often served as the organic intellectuals of insurgent forces in the middle and lower levels of the UGTT. As they aged, some became bureaucrats, pragmatists, apologists for autocracy, and opportunists. Others persisted in maintaining a variety of left political views.

In Egypt, the enormous contingent of civil servants and lower-level white-collar public employees (