Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere Read Online Free Page B

privatization, and further diminished by job losses after 2008, the Egyptian working class had a clear demographic identity under Mubarak. You could see it on the picket lines that formed in early February.
    At the gates of the Suez Canal Port Authority, it was middle-aged men and their sons in orange overalls. Big-chested guys who’d had to fight for these jobs—and defy the state-run union to go on strike and occupy the port. Among the Real Estate Tax Authority Workers in their blue baseball caps, who marched into Tahrir calling for Mubarak to go, there were more women: but that same confident, educated culture was evident. They’d been the first to break from Mubarak’s state-run union federation in 2008.
    This is a class with status: the men seem physically larger than the urban poor, and the demographic is discernibly centred on the age group 35–55. And they have a culture of solidarity. For Mubarak, the price of maintaining the state-run union as an organ of control within the workplace had been to hold congresses, maintain the NDP’s membership of the Socialist International, to keep the ILO onside, and to deliver material concessions. In 2008, 5.9 million government workers won a 30 per cent pay rise in 2008, while Mubarak was forced to double food, health and education subsidies, from LE64 billion to LE128 billion ($22 billion). 5
    By 9 February the pattern of action was clear: workers were beginning to form unions separate from the state-run union, often seizing the workplace and kicking out the boss. At a textile factory in Daqahliya they sacked the CEO and began self-management. At a printing house in Cairo, they did the same. In Suez, where there had been heavy repression, the steel mill and the fertilizer factory had declared all-out strikes until the fall of the regime. 6
    Egyptian activists are split over the significance of this late-stage strike wave: some think it was a second-order effect of the mass unrest, others believe it was decisive in beginning to split the army—and thus forcing the SCAF to depose Mubarak. What is not in doubt is that, after 11 February, worker unrest took off.
    Mohammed Shafiq, a psychiatrist at the Manshiyet el Bakri hospital in Cairo, had been in Tahrir Square as a volunteer medic from day one, treating the injured in one of the makeshift clinics:
    I had been in Tahrir for about ten days. I’m tired, I’m hungry, so I decided to go to my own hospital as there was a standstill between the regime and the protesters. In the hospital there was a revolutionary mood. Even those who supported Mubarak knew the situation could not go on. I started a petition, with some of the demands I’d been hearing in Tahrir Square: all the doctors signed and then, amazingly, nurses started coming to me, saying: ‘You are demanding a cut in hours and an increase in wages—what about us?’
    Shafiq describes what happened next as ‘the collapse of invisible walls’: the nurses, the technicians, the porters added their demands.
    Then he returned to Tahrir: the last days of Mubarak, followed by days of chaos and celebration, were frantic for the medics. But when he went back to the hospital in mid-February, the workers asked: ‘What happened to our petition?’ By now the entire workforce of 750 people, including managers, had signed it. They formed a cross-professional trade union. The nurses staged a sit-in over unpaid wages. The doctors also joined: junior doctors in a public hospital earned just LE300 a month basic, while hospital administrators could earn LE2,000. Shafiq says:
    The manager in every hospital is like a small dictator, they are a ‘Mubarak in the workplace’. But we’d just decapitated Mubarak! After four weeks we decided to sack the manager. We told him not to come to work, and told the security guards to lock him out. He went to the ministry and complained—but the union ran the hospital for two weeks