A Revolutionary Socialist

Long-time labor and political activist Hossam El Hamalawy gives his insight on the labor movement in Egypt and what it may hold for the countrys economic and political future.
By Amr Aref
Mohsen Allam

A member of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists movement since 1998, Hamalawy is a veteran supporter of labor rights. The blog he started in 2006 covers industrial actions by the Egyptian working class and news of police abuse. Hamalawys work as a labor and political activist has led to his detention several times by the former regime and shaped his political and economic inclinations.

Q: What were the reasons for your detention by the regime?

Hamalawy: Ive been detained three times before, and they were all prior to the revolution. The first time was in October 2000 when I was a postgraduate student at the American University in Cairo. I was organizing a protest on campus in solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada. These protests were not only mobilized against the US and Israel, but they were also critical of Mubarak. We were slamming the local regime for its complacency with what was going on in the Occupied Territories. At some point we managed to bring down the US flag from atop the university, which at the time overlooked Tahrir Square. I was then kidnapped on October 8 and kept in custody for four days during which I was tortured. I was detained again in 2002 at the State Security headquarters in Nasr City and another time in 2003 following the antiwar riots in Tahrir Square.

Q: The Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) is supposedly the body responsible for protecting labor rights. What is your opinion of the ETUF and has it been doing its job?
Hamalawy: The ETUF is not a trade union. It is basically a state-run bureaucratic structure of appointed government officials as well as security-friendly workers. It is made up of those who have close ties to the security services and factories management, and so they are not representatives of the workplace. Ever since it was established in 1957 by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the ETUF has been the regimes arm when it comes to mobilizing and controlling the working class. If you look at election rigging over the decades, whose buses are shipping voters into the different polling stations? Its the ETUF. When Mubarak visited any city, who were these people standing on the side clapping and cheering? They were public sector employees mobilized by the ETUF. The ETUF has only ever endorsed two labor strikes. The first was in 1994 or 1995 by the miners and the second was in 2010 by the Tanta Flax and Oils Company. Other than that, the federation has never supported a strike, never lobbied for labor rights. They were a driving force behind privatization and supported the neo-liberal scheme. I regard them as a body

Famous

for his online blog arabawy. org, Hossam El Hamalawy began his career in 2002 as a journalist with the Cairo Times. He later moved on to work as a freelancer for several Western publications and news outlets and a researcher for the Human Rights Watch organization. His work includes the co-authoring of reports on the extraordinary renditions and secret prisons in Egypt. He is also the founding managing editor of Al-Masry Al-Youms English edition and was part of the founding editorial team of Al Ahram Online.

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of investigations and security informants rather than one that represents the workers.

Q: 2006 saw one of strongest waves of labor protest in Egypts history. Can you discuss how the wave started and how it is now culminating towards establishing trade unions that are independent of the ETUF?
Hamalawy: The labor movement that started in 2006 is the strongest one since at least 1946 following the end of the Second World War. At that time, a huge wave of social and political protests broke out calling for independence from the British as well demanding social justice. Later, in 1977, Egyptian workers went through a very strong strike wave that was crushed by Sadat and labeled Intifadet Al Harameya or an Intifada of Thieves; kind of like how they are now calling revolutionaries baltageya or thugs. However, for the most recent wave that started in 2006, it started when former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif had promised workers of the Misr Spinning and Weaving two months bonuses and failed to deliver. As a result, 3,000 female garment workers started a strike. They marched into the departments that house their male colleagues and chanted El Regala Fein, El Hareem Ahom (Here are the women! Where are the men?) They actually shamed them into action. As I told you earlier, the ETUF had never supported a strike action, so typically they were standing against this one. This led to a campaign of collecting signatures by the workers demanding the impeachment of their union officials and the withdrawal of confidence from the state-run union. By January 2007, the workers had collected 13,000 signatures and descended on the headquarters of the General Union for Textile Workers located in Shubra. They gave them an ultimatum, either to impeach the officials or else the workers would launch an independent national federation of trade unions. The ETUF refused to impeach the local officials, and there were crackdowns by the security apparatus against the Mahalla workers. They imposed many restrictions which prevented the workers from establishing their union. However, they [workers] had started the [struggle]. It then became customary that after every strike the workers would collect signatures demanding the withdrawal of confidence from the union of concern. From October 2007 until December 2007, the property tax collectors led by Kamal Abu Eita went on strike demanding that they be re-associated with the Ministry of Finance (MoF). In 1974, these employees had been disassociated from the MoF and instead became part of the local municipality. This meant the termination of several benefits such as salary allowances and the like. You would find a property tax collector bringing in millions of pounds into the state treasury, yet his salary was a mere LE 250 a month. The strike culminated with an 11-day occupation of Hussein Hegazy Street and was successful as the workers managed to raise their salaries by 325%. After this strike, the leadership decided to [create] an independent trade union for the property tax collectors. Kamal Abu Eita and his comrades toured the

All of this inspiration and the revolution is not yet over, so imagine what will happen once it is. I have no doubt that we will win this war with the regime and that the revolution will be successful.
different provinces collecting signatures and raising awareness about the importance of representative trade unions, as this culture had been non-existent since 1957. In December 2008, they declared the establishment of the first independent trade union in Egypt, which triggered a domino effect. They were followed by pension workers and health technicians, and then on January 30, 2011 the nucleus for the first independent trade union federation was announced in Tahrir Square. In the span of one year they grew from just three unions to somewhere between 150 and 200 independent unions.

Q: The establishment of independent trade unions that truly represent the workers is without a doubt a positive development for the labor market in Egypt. However, some business owners would argue that the laborers are not economically savvy. For example, their position on privatization is based on a corrupt experience, yet they stereotype this experience as the underlining framework for any privatization deals. This is despite the fact that some of these deals could be beneficial to them and the economy. What would you say to that argument?
Hamalawy: They are trying to put forward this tricky argument that corrupt privatization is bad but privatization itself is good. Give me one single privatization deal that was not corrupt. Privatizations in itself is corruption. You are making the workers pay for the mistakes of management. Factories that were losing money and later privatized were making these losses due to the lack of investments which is not the workers fault; its managements responsibility. Neo-liberalism is about getting out of your capitalist crisis by making the workers pay for it when they actually have nothing to do with it. In the Shubra meeting that I mentioned earlier, Saeed Al Gohary, who is the head of the General Union for Textile Workers, told the Mahalla workers that they have no right to ask for anything since their company is making losses. Kamal Al Fayoumi, a leader of the labor movement in Mahalla, replied saying, Listen, I am a worker. You give me a production plan and I implement it for you. What happens with the product is not my problem but its the marketing and managements responsibility. Dont make me pay for their mistakes. I thought that this was a brilliant destruction of the neoliberal logic. This attitude, that the workers dont know whats best for them, is patronizing. Its the same patronizing attitude of the regime over the past decades, so I completely reject it.

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Mohsen Allam

zations in the revolutionary left, and our fight in creating a real grassroots federation of trade unions still continues on a daily basis. What we are striving for is to build a labor party that will have real industrial and urban presence. We hope to link the strike leaders together and link them with the most militant sections of the student movement and the farmers movement in order to create a strong political party.

Q: I understand that you believe a strong politicized labor movement is the only hope for the success of the Egyptian revolution. Can you explain why you believe so?
Hamalawy: I believe that the labor movement holds the seeds of hope for the success of this revolution, because I believe that the roots of oppression, poverty and the malaise in society can be largely linked to the capitalist system that we are living in. It is this capitalist system that basically creates the inequalities that we are living under and reaps the fruits of the labor for the sake of those who only own but dont actually participate in the production process. The workers are the ones who create the profit in this society. They are the ones who operate the machines and they are the ones who can bring them to a halt. This is largely the most successful peaceful weapon you have when you are fighting a dictatorship.

Q: How would a general strike serve this fight?

Hamalawy: In order to pull together a general strike, you first need to have an entity with roots and branches in the different workplaces. This means that you have people on the ground who are ready to mobilize when there is a call for it. When all the workers go on strike and put forward their demands, the regime will have no other option but to satisfy them. Otherwise, the entire country comes to a halt and the whole system collapses. And if the army decides to open fire, I think it would be impossible for them to maintain the ranks. They might be able to brainwash some officers into shooting a small number of protesters in Tahrir Square by calling them thugs and so forth, but can they shoot a million people in the square? The general strike will bring the wheel to a halt, and the regime will have to make concessions for it to work again. If the movement feels that they cannot hold the strike indefinitely, then they will accept these concessions. However, if the movement is strong enough it can seize power altogether, seize the factories and start managing its own affairs.

Q: I understand that the labor movement does not yet have a political arm due to restrictions set by the controversial law for political participation. Are there currently any efforts to establish such an arm regardless of the restrictions?
Hamalawy: The law that organizes the formation of political parties in Egypt bans the establishment of any party that is based on sectarian, race or class ideology. This means for example that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists in general shouldnt be allowed to form parties. However, their relationship with the army allowed them to do so. It also means that socialists and workers cannot form their political parties either. The logic is that they would be calling for the rights and benefits of workers and so they are empowering one class over the other. However, this does not mean that efforts on the ground to establish a labor party have stopped. I am part of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists movement which is the biggest organi-

Q: Do you think the labor movement in Egypt currently has this strength?
Hamalawy: When Kamal Abu Eita makes statements to the media, he talks about his independent trade union federation representing over two million workers. However, when there was a call for a general strike on February 11, we didnt see those two million workers. So on paper these independent unions might actually rep-

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resent two million people, but translating this into real mobilizing power is a different story. There is a great degree of unevenness in these unions in the sense that they were all established under different conditions. You will find unions that were built in the middle of strikes and others that were founded thanks to a legal process. There is also unevenness within each union. For example, the public transport workers union has unionized 10,000 out of 40,000 workers; so not everyone in a sector is a member of a union. These independent unions are new and are considered green unions. They have not yet established a strong grassroots presence. What they can do, however, is to intervene when the situation on the ground is already explosive. They can steer the direction left or right, but to start something out of the blue is still not possible.

Trade unions at the end of the day can be bureaucratized like what we currently have in the US and other Western countries; they end up being what we call corporate unions.
in any part of the world are self-management of the factories and a direct democracy as a political channel for running the country. When Ramy Lakah fled the country, who was managing his factories? It was the workers; they had established self -management. This concept resonated in Argentina when there was a huge wave of factories being occupied by the workers who managed them by themselves. Currently in Egypt, such a move has not yet materialized, but I think it will start to happen soon enough. There is a wave of re-nationalization of the privatized companies. However, the workers will soon realize that this is not enough as the government does not invest in these factories and will actually bring back the same corrupt management that ruined them in the first place. This will be a step into the realization that the workers must manage the factories themselves.

Q: You say that a strong labor movement is the silver bullet for any dictatorship. However, when I put this in a global context and compare it with labor movements in Western countries, I see that even though they have a very well developed and efficient labor representation system, it has not prevented the kind of economic dictatorship or capitalist inequalities that you refer to. This is very evident in the Occupy movement in the US and other protests and riots in different parts of Europe. Dont you think that the labor movement in Egypt will ultimately face the same struggles as its counterparts in the West?
Hamalawy: When I talk about the labor movement, I always say that they need two arms. They need an independent federation of trade unions, but that alone is not enough. Trade unions at the end of the day can be bureaucratized like what we currently have in the US and other Western countries; they end up being what we call corporate unions. Ultimately, the function of a trade union is to alleviate the conditions of exploitation, meaning that if you are exploited for LE 100 per month, the union would fight so that you are exploited for LE 120 per month. However, they do not eliminate exploitation altogether. That should be the job of the political arm of the working class, which is the party that will represent their political interests in such debates. This party should work to seize power and actually change the economic and political system.

Q: You are talking about fully empowering the working class, which does not fit well in the current context of global economics. How do you think the ruling class will react to this?
Hamalawy: No ruling class will ever give up power easily. If there werent a concerted effort by the ruling class to safeguard their privileges and hold on to power, then this revolution would have happened centuries ago and it would have all been over. The ruling class is armed with prison cells, security forces, armed forces, mass media operations and the schooling and education system. They have these tools. Thats why I believe that the revolutionaries and the working class need to have their own tools. They need their own political party and their own media. Its basically a war.

Q: What about the labor party in the UK that didnt do much to change the system?
Hamalawy: I think of this party as a reformist social democratic party, and it is not the kind of party I am hoping to build. What I am hoping for is a revolutionary party that in essence derives its power from a big base amongst the laborers and works to change the regime and not be part of it or reform it. Nasser and the Soviet Union are also not the kind of socialist models that I am talking about, these were state capitalism. We have seen glimpses before of the kind of socialism I am talking about. In the first two years of the Russian Revolution it was the workers unions that were running the country through a direct democracy. The two wings of socialism that I want to see in Egypt and

Q: Do you think that this model of social democracy can be developed in Egypt and serve as an example for other countries?
Hamalawy: Absolutely. In the same way the glimpses of liberation in Tahrir Square and other parts of Egypt provided an inspiration for the Libyans, Syrians and Yemenis to move. Weve seen Egyptian flags in Greece, Spain and in the Occupy movements and sit-ins. All of this inspiration and the revolution is not yet over, so imagine what will happen once it is. I have no doubt that we will win this war with the regime and that the revolution will be successful. And once it is, we will be able to build a model for the whole world; a new model of social democracy. bt

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