"Egypt’s brutal crackdown on workers’ rights runs far deeper than the fate of two actors", 27 March 2019

Sisi’s crushing of all dissent within Egypt’s traditionally powerful trade union movements, which have historically fought the British colonial power as well as the Nasser and Sadat regimes, and which played a powerful but tragically disregarded role in the revolution which destroyed the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.

Just over a year ago, the Egyptian authorities excluded independent trade syndicates from participating in the first trade union elections to be held in 12 years. Amnesty has complained about the Egyptian government’s “punitive campaign against workers and trade unionists to deter and punish them from mobilising or going on strike”.

Romantics like to portray Egypt’s independence struggle as a battle for freedom by a nationalist, anti-colonial people who demanded democracy, free elections and dignity after years of oppression under a succession of dictatorships financed by Britain, Russia and then by the United States. But this is only partly true. It was also a religious struggle (hence the brief Morsi interlude after Mubarak’s overthrow) and, less well publicized, it was also a workers’ demand for freedom and a living wage.

Egypt’s great cotton industry in the Delta north of Cairo has been the centre of this often forgotten revolution, an export center whose workers have great industrial power – if and when they are permitted to exercise it. They struck under British rule and they staged successive rebellions under Mubarak. The most important of these occurred in 2006 when women cotton workers led their menfolk in an uprising against the regime in the big industrial city of Mahalla. They used social media to bring tens of thousands of workers from the countryside into the central square of the city – it was, in fact, also called Tahrir Square – and set up tent encampments under fire from police tear gas. [..]