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

Author:Joel Beinin [Beinin, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2015-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

4

POPULAR UPRISINGS IN 2011 AND BEYOND

Contestations throughout Egypt during the 2000s created a “culture of protest” and normalized demonstrations in public space.1 The liberal oppositional intelligentsia, like most workers themselves, considered the workers movement “nonpolitical.” Most Western journalists and think-tankers, if they were aware of the upsurge of workers’ collective actions at all, repeatedly asked when (or if) the movement would become “political.”

The harsher climate of repression blocked the emergence of a culture of protest in Tunisia. The regime methodically obstructed advocacy NGOs like the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH). Although no similar contestation reached the intensity of the 2008 Gafsa rebellion, unemployed graduates and youth of the interior regions repeatedly protested their marginalization, poverty, and high unemployment rates: in May 2008 in Kasserine and during 2010 at the port of Skhira, Sidi Bouzid, and Menzel Bouzaiane.2 The legal media rarely reported such contestations, and the liberal coastal intelligentsia was not engaged in them. They did not imagine that such social struggles might acquire more political impact than Tunis-centered NGO work or legal political opposition.

In both Egypt and Tunisia, most of the oppositional intelligentsia failed to appreciate that in an authoritarian regime, recurring mobilizations of large numbers of people seizing control of public space—workers, the unemployed, devotees of the “apolitical” preacher ‘Amr Khalid, or soccer fans—are inherently political.

PUBLIC SPACE AND CYBER SPACE

On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2008, the New Woman Foundation organized a celebration in a Cairo park to honor women who had been prominent in the workers movement and other social protests. The foundation’s president, Nawla Darwiche, is the daughter of the veteran communist labor lawyer, Yusuf Darwiche (see Chapter 2). She inherited both her father’s commitment to workers and the respect of thousands who knew him. Hundreds of female and male workers and supporters from Cairo and the Delta attended the celebration.

On May 1, 2010 several hundred workers and others demonstrated in front of the People’s Assembly demanding that the government implement a 2009 court order to establish a “fair” monthly minimum basic wage, which they believed was 1,200 pounds. They chanted, “A fair minimum wage, or let this government go home,” and “Down with Mubarak and all those who raise prices!” Labor lawyer Khalid ‘Ali, executive director of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, told the press, “The government represents the marriage between authority and money—and this marriage needs to be broken up. . . . We call for the resignation of Ahmad Nazif’s government because it works only for businessmen and ignores social justice.”3 Unlike his more timid colleagues in the NGO world, ‘Ali had the boldness and rhetorical skill to characterize the regime accurately in popular language that suggested the necessity of regime change.

Except for the December 2007 municipal real estate tax assessors’ strike, no more than several hundred workers came to demonstrate in Cairo on any single occasion. The expense, inconvenience, and risks were prohibitive. Nonetheless, increasingly frequent occupations of public space consolidated a new practice in the Egyptian repertoire of

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