It's game over for Egypt's workers

Egypt is undergoing unprecedented industrial strikes this week. Over half a million public sector workers have participated in demonstrations, marches and sit-ins across the country since the beginning of the month. The first independent trade unions in Egypt's history, inaugurated since the revolution, are cracking their knuckles by coordinating non-violent political action on a massive scale.

Huge numbers of teachers, doctors and factory workers are putting enormous economic and political pressure on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces by refusing to work until the interim government concedes to their demands. Schools are closed, factories are empty and hospitals are dangerously understaffed. This is, without a doubt, the largest walkout of working and middle class Egyptians in modern history.

Yet, astoundingly, the English speaking world remains deaf to their calls. In stark contrast to the round-the-clock coverage of the events in Tahrir Square in January and February 2011, the workers' uprising is receiving little or no international exposure. Global newspapers appear morbidly obsessed by US-Israeli relations, Twitter feeds are trending exclusively in Arabic and Al-Jazeera is reposting articles about strikes in April.

Considering that Egyptian laborers alone are estimated to number around 25 million, the potential power that trade unions and workers' parties can exert is phenomenal and no complete resolution to the Arab Spring can be realized until the labor movement is satisfied. This is a modern socialist revolution in action and its absence on the international political scene constitutes a media blackout of Mubarak-esque proportions.

What little international attention there is being paid to the Egyptian labor movement is often cynical and misinformed. The compulsion of certain bystanders to urge Egyptians to calm down, return to work and expect change in the not-too-distant future is unsettling and naive. An editorial in a Kuwaiti daily last week condemned the recent 'muscle-flexing display of anarchists' outside various government buildings, as if the author were reprimanding his adolescent son for throwing a tantrum.

Apart from its patronizing tone, this particular attitude proves that many continue to believe that the 25 January Revolution has already been concluded and that the labor movement is somehow disconnected from the toppling of Mubarak's regime. Nothing could be further from the truth.