Egyptian Workers Hold Key to Uprising, New Union Association Issues Call for General Strike

Originally posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

While much analysis has focused on the youth-social network driven aspects of the recent uprising in Egypt, or on diplomatic and political maneuvers that thus far have left President Mubarak in office, and given even more power to the state repressive apparatus through the appointment of Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to the Vice Presidency, it is the Egyptian working class that holds the future of its country in its hands.

While the organized workers movement saw its unions gutted by state privatization and the gutting of union independence though the hated Law No. 100, which guaranteed that union representation would be strongly controlled by the state, recent events, particularly in strategic Suez, have shown that when the social weight of the workers is thrown into the balance, even all the machinations of Hillary Clinton's State Department will not be able to patch together Mubarak's state apparatus. The question then will be, what will follow it?

End of Hated Anti-Union Law No. 100 Preceded Uprising

Barely reported in the West, among the crowds at Tahrir Square last Sunday, a new trade union confederation was announced, the Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions (FETU), which immediately issued a call for a general-strike. The call has been widely taken up, and many reports now link the uprising to unity with the workers, particularly in Suez, where the battle has been fought most intensely with state police. The new confederation has the support of the International Trades Union Confederation and the AFL-CIO.

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the general strike call initiated from workers in Suez. Whoever initiated it, the new trade union organizations are jumping on board.

Law No. 100 has regulated union internal activities since 1993, by setting quotas for attendance for elections to union offices, and putting judicial controls on unions that cannot meet the stringent requirements. The FETU leadership includes the head of the Real Estate Tax Authority Workers union, or RETA, the first independent union in Egypt in over 50 years. RETA itself is not recognized by the Egyptian state. The Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS), also a part of the new FETU, had its headquarters closed by the government in 2007, and was only allowed to reopen in July 2008.

In a judicial action that threw Egyptian union politics into turmoil, the Egyptian Gazette reported on Jan. 6 of this year that Egypt's Constitutional Court had recently thrown out Law No. 100, "citing legal and logical reasons for its verdict."

The annulment of the law, however, has stirred up a hornet’s nest in the professional unions as some members called for the cancellation of the latest election results in their associations, while others stuck firmly to these election results and said the law could not be applied in retrospect.

“Law No. 100 was so bad that the professional unions suffered extreme stagnation because of it,” said Mohamed Abul Nour, a veteran Bar Association member.

“The law did away with all chances for holding fair elections inside these unions,” he told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. [Due to the fact that Internet access to the Gazette site appears blocked, I am relying on Google cache pages, which may become outdated in the near future.]

Meanwhile, layoffs of Egyptian workers in the Suez industrial zone have been increasing of late, with international companies replacing these workers with foreign imported workers from India and Thailand, causing much resentment, and even supposed notice from the Egyptian government. Now, companies are starting to pull foreign workers out of the area, as the uprising and protest in Egypt does not appear to be dying down and thousands of foreign workers and other foreign nationals, including from the U.S., are crowding Cairo airport trying to get out of the country before a feared explosion.

Suez Center of Workers Protests

The contradictions of Egyptian society are most intense in the port city of Suez, home to the Suez Canal, and a major industrial center. As a recent Associated Press story put it:

... Mostafa Khaled, 21, said he wasn't looking forward to graduating from school this year, even in a city where 100 factories produce everything from steel to fabrics, generating $5 billion a year in tax revenue for the national government.

"Suez brings in the highest profit of all the cities in Egypt to the country and yet look at us - we are close to begging. We have no jobs, we scrounge to feed our families," Khaled said. "We don't want Mubarak, we don't want this government, we want our basic human rights."

While some are looking to the new Egyptian unions to lead the way, their linkages to the AFL-CIO may amount to an attempt to rein in or control militancy among workers, especially as news accounts note the presence of leftists, and not just Islamists, among the protesters. The purges of the Egyptian unions themselves were meant to limit the influence of not just the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist groups, but of radicals in the union movement.

U.S. Military in Close Contact with Egyptian Officers

The situation in Egypt is quite fluid, and the U.S. government is certain to be a major player in events, or try to be. The L.A. Times reported yesterday that "top Pentagon officials" were in close telephone contact with "their Egyptian counterparts." It is not out of the question that sooner or later the U.S. will call upon their Egyptian military associates to forcibly quell the demonstrators and lockdown the society, either under Mubarak, or under some other new puppet leader, possibly Suleiman himself.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates spoke to Egyptian Defense Minister Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, who would not provide details of their conversation.

Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also spoke with Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, the chief of staff of the Egyptian armed forces.

In the 10-minute call, "both men reaffirmed their desire to see the partnership between our two militaries continue," said Capt. John Kirby, Mullen's spokesman.

The U.S. has been a primary economic and military backer of Mubarak's government, seeing it as a central pillar of its Middle Eastern policy, even if that meant turning a mostly blind eye, or making perfunctory complaints about human rights abuses. Perfunctory they certainly were, because the U.S. itself utilized Egyptian torturers as part of the rendition program involved in the interrogation and torture of hundreds, if not thousands, of "war on terror" prisoners caught by the U.S. and its allies.

The last thing the U.S. wants to see is the rebirth of a strong and fully-independent workers movement in the Middle East. In this they may be joined by the autocrats of the other regimes, including the rulers of Saudi Arabia, where trade unions and strikes are banned. Nor, despite some cheering from afar, would trade union leaders in the United States like to see any kind of union militancy spill back past U.S. borders, where the complacency and unimaginative leadership of the U.S. labor movement has presided over the long-term decline in workers salaries and standard of living, as overall union membership continues to shrink.

As we watch events unfold in Egypt, watch closely what happens in the labor movement. While the "street" may move according to news from Twitter and other social networking sites, the only social force with both the economic and social leverage to combat the military, given the power of the latter, is the labor movement, which has the potential to provide leadership to the workers in the oil fields, the factories, the ports, and the Canal itself.

The leadership of that movement was eviscerated by the government over many years, but that may mean that new leaders and forces, ones dedicated to completely rooting out the brutal, torture-loving dictatorship once and for all, can come to the fore.

Senior Greek Official: “We may have an uprising in the making”

Originally posted at Firedoglake/Seminal

What if three million protesters poured into the streets of American cities, and with a general strike shut down all transportation, closing government offices, and setting banks and office buildings ablaze?

If one takes into account the size of Greece, a proportionate amount of the Greek population did just that on May 5. Over 100,000 protesters took took to the streets. But this was not your ordinary European mass rally. World markets, including Wall Street, felt the tremor from these demonstrations. The protests are against onerous economic cutbacks in the wake of a € 110 billion Euro ($145 billion) bailout for a near-bankrupt economy. But a large percentage of the Greek population doesn’t see itself paying for a generation for the corruption of their own officials, and the economic shock therapy dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and German bankers.

From the UK Guardian:

"All of us are angry, very, very angry," bellowed Stella Stamou, a civil servant standing on a street corner, screaming herself hoarse, a block away from where the bank had been set alight.

"You write that – angry, angry, angry, angry," she said, after participating in one of the biggest ever rallies to rock the capital since the return of democracy in 1974. "Angry with our own politicians, angry with the IMF, angry with the EU, angry that we have lost income, angry that we have never been told the truth."

From the Wall Street Journal:

"For 30 years the Greek people have been held hostage," said Periandros Athanassakis, 48, a garbage collector in Piraeus, the port near Athens. "Those who stole the money should pay."

Some officials saw in Wednesday’s protests the seeds of broader discontent. "We may have an uprising in the making," one senior Greek official said.

The New York Times focused on the violence, predicting (in their hopeful way) that the violence would bring about a government reaction, and a backlash of Greeks "against a growing number of extremists". The Grey Lady intoned, "Some said they were willing to endure what some economists predict could be 10 years before the economy bounces back," even while others were responding differently:

… clustered among the protesters were subgroups numbering in the hundreds — mostly young and many clad in black, wearing hoods or masks and carrying helmets, wooden bats or hammers — that the police and other demonstrators identified broadly as anarchists. They led efforts to storm the Parliament building, chanting “thieves, thieves,” and hurling rocks and gasoline bombs.

Everyone agrees that the situation in Greece is dire. And Greece is the proverbial canary in the coalmine, as world financiers look doubtfully upon Spain’s 20% unemployment rate and indebtedness, and precarious economic conditions from the UK to Italy. The Germans are the real power behind the EU, and their economy is the one that others are looking to for a bail out the weaker states — but only at a price. The Germans are holding firm to the terms of their bailout, even as German chancellor Angela Merkel said, "Quite simply, Europe’s future is at stake."

What’s the Bailout Deal?

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has a difficult, maybe impossible austerity package to sell to the Greek people. The Greek state has been living on borrowed funds for some time. The bailout deal proposed by the Germans and IMF demands Greece reduce its national borrowing rate from 13.4% of national income to 3% within four years. But where’s the money going to come from?

According to another New York Times story:

The new measures include an increase of two percentage points in the value-added sales tax, which is now 19 percent; a further increase in the fuel tax; increases of 20 percent for alcohol taxes and 6 percent for cigarette taxes; a new tax on luxury goods; and a 12 percent cut in supplements to wages for civil servants, Mr. Petalotis said.

They also include a 30 percent reduction in the bonuses given to civil servants as holiday pay, which amount to two additional monthly wages, he said.

The Gerson Lehrman Company describes how the Greek economy is going to be chopped up and sold to the highest bidder, many of those foreign. Of course, they are quite sober about it all:

The government will accelerate privatizations (€ 2.5 bill. budgeted for 2010) and may change its mind regarding majority ownership by strategic (foreign/EU) investors of types of assets / industries that have been protected under the existing social /political model, including utility/infrastructure, transport or special state (monopoly) assets. Examples might include the railway company, water distribution companies, the electricity grid or the power company (PPC), as well as the soccer betting company (OPAP), gambling Casinos and the remaining stake in Hellenic Telecom (OTE), which will probably be sold to Deutsche Telekom. Other interesting candidates for privatization might include airports and seaports and enhanced PPP/PFI models will be considered for infrastructure investments.

So goodbye living wages, goodbye state-run utilities, transport, and telecom. As the quote above makes clear, German companies are primed to sweep up the goodies off the bargain basement floor. This is a bitter pill for the Greeks, who endured Nazi occupation during World War II, which they answered with a large bloody resistance. The old hatreds and resentments still simmer under the surface.

Back in February, Greek Deputy prime minister Theodoros Pangalos lashed out:

Nazi theft of Greek gold during the Second World War is to blame for the country’s faltering finances, Athens claimed yesterday….

Greece said the real culprit for its problems were the Nazis, whose occupation lasted from 1941 to 1945….

Germany swiftly rejected the accusation, saying it paid £50 million in compensation by 1960 and more to forced labourers of the Nazi regime.

Where is this all headed?

People in the U.S. are used to hearing about European general strikes. In the popular mind, fostered by a somnolent and ignorant press, such protests are quaint European customs, artifacts of a past that is not relevant anymore, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. But this is a crisis that is not going to go away. And within living memory, European states have turned to violent coups and dictatorships to quell popular dissent, as in Greece and Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Italy, U.S./NATO-backed right-wing terrorists, part of the left-behind armies of Operation Gladio, facilitated the Italian government’s "strategy of tension" during the 1980s in order to keep the then-popular Italian Communist Party from entering the Italian government. Philip Willan covered the revelations of this story in the UK Guardian a decade ago:

The 300-page [Italian parliamentary] report says that the United States was responsible for inspiring a "strategy of tension" in which indiscriminate bombing of the public and the threat of a rightwing coup were used to stabilise centre-right political control of the country.

Those who carried out the attacks were rarely caught, it said, because "those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence".

The crisis in Greece and the European Union in general is exposing the deep flaws within the post-Soviet economic and political structure in Europe. The fires in Athens are a harbinger of a bigger crisis to come, one that Americans will have to pay attention to. But do not count on the U.S. press to honestly report what will happen, or the U.S. government to stand aside in neutrality. The Obama administration is pushing the Europeans and the IMF to get the bailout deal in place quickly, even as right-wing Republicans are screaming they will not support the U.S. paying its portion of the IMF bailout funds.

The people of Greece seem determined they will not pay for the orgy of corruption and double-dealing that has left their economy in tatters. Whether it was Goldman Sachs playing funny with derivatives to help the Greek government to hide its debt, or German companies rushing to buy up newly privatized industries, or the wide-spread corruption of Greek politicians, they are saying something that American workers and middle class might be thinking, and that has some people afraid: "’let the plutocracy pay’…’400">