The Foundations of State-Labor Relations in Contemporary Egypt

Abstract

Discussion of labor and the state by political scientists generally moves in one of two possible directions, concentrating on either the degree of open competition in the political order or the large-scale social and political effects of conflict over the division of the national income. The first direction generally addresses pluralism and corporatism, and union organization is a by-product of more consequential state decisions about organizing the economy. The second approach generally appears in the literature on Marxism, Communist parties, and revolution. Significant differences exist between these analytic frameworks, but both view the limitation of the political and economic independence of union movements as something imposed on largely unwilling union leaders and members who nevertheless benefit from the growth and concentration of union memberships and from distributive state policies. While both of these approaches can be enlightening, they leave aspects of the problem of corporatism unexplained. For example, why do workers and their unions often seem to welcome the limitation of competition implicit in corporatism?' Could it have to do with the ways workers compete for jobs and firms compete for shares of markets? When we recall that workers often must choose between increasing their wages and securing their claims to employment, then part of the corporatist puzzle may be understood as an instrumental and hence necessarily transitory bargain between workers and the state. Arguments about corporatism have largely been reflected in recent books and articles on the Egyptian labor movement as well as on other parts of the developing world. Robert Bianchi and Mustafa Kamil Al-Sayyid are among the most prominent names associated with the interest group perspective on corporatism, while Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman are the most prominent advocates of a Marxist approach.2 Marsha Pripstein Posusney has attempted to combine elements of both neo-Marxist political economy and interest group approaches in her work on the contemporary labor movement.3 In Workers on the Nile, Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman take an explicitly Marxist approach to the history of the Egyptian labor movement. Writing as historians determined to avoid the pitfalls of mechanical determinism and economism, Beinin and Lockman never define very clearly their analytic framework. Rather, they tell us that objective economic relations constitute the basis for a certain configuration of political and ideological relations in a given society, and it is in the matrix of this structured totality that class struggle takes place.4 The empirically rich book that results from this approach only barely retains its analytic mooring to the assumption that workers and owners struggle ceaselessly over division of the profits in the firm and division of the national income and political power in society as a whole.5 Writing on his own, Beinin uses a more well-defined Marxist approach and tells us that