The Egyptian workers' movement before and after the 2011 popular uprising

Abstract

In January and February 2014, about 100,000 workers participated in strikes and other collective actions. The pace of protest escalated further in March when thousands of public sector doctors, dentists and pharmacists declared a full strike, as did thousands of Alexandria Public Transport workers. During the year’s first quarter there were a total of 240 labour actions. Projected to an annual basis, this is a significant decline from the high point of 2011-12, but still far more than any year during the decade before the demise of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Perhaps unsurprisingly in the era of global neoliberal hegemony, the significance of the workers’ movement has been underestimated in both Western and Egyptian explanations for Mubarak’s overthrow. Egyptian workers had participated significantly in the burgeoning culture of protest that delegitimized the Mubarak regime during the decade before his ouster on 11 February 2011. The recent upsurge followed a relatively quiescent six-month period after the ouster of President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brothers-sponsored Freedom and Justice Party. Morsi was removed by a combination of massive popular demonstrations on 30 June 2013 – even larger than those that had led to the demise of Mubarak two and a half years earlier – followed by a military coup on July 3 after serving just one year in office as Egypt’s first democratically elected president. The essay will explore the roots of the 2011 popular uprising and chart the cycle of contention over economic demands that began in the late 1990s. Egyptian workers have sharply escalated the pace of their strikes and collective actions, a movement that has been in large measure a response, albeit for the most part not articulated in these terms, to the neoliberal transformation of the Egyptian economy.