A Revolutionary Socialist

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. Hamalawy’s 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: I’ve 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 regime’s 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? It’s 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 of investigations and security informants rather than one that represents the workers.

Q: 2006 saw one of strongest waves of labor protest in Egypt’s 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 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; it’s management’s 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 it’s the marketing and management’s responsibility. Don’t make me pay for their mistakes.” I thought that this was a brilliant destruction of the neo-liberal logic. This attitude, that the workers don’t know what’s best for them, is patronizing. It’s the same patronizing attitude of the regime over the past decades, so I completely reject it.

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 shouldn’t 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 organizations in the revolutionary left, and our fight in creating a real grassroots federation of trade unions still continues on a daily basis.