Egypt's Continuing Labor Issues

The latest group to strike in Egypt is the pharmacists' syndicate (shorter English version here). With so many big international, war-and-peace issues in the Middle East, internal domestic problems tend to get little coverage in the international press, but in recent years, and particularly for the past two years, labor-related and pay-related issues have provoked a wave of strikes, demonsrations, and protests across Egypt. While some demonstrations, such as those in support of the people of Gaza, do get some coverage due to their international political content, many of the strikes go unreported or barely remarked upon.

For well over a year now Egypt's big industrial city in the Delta, Al-Mahalla al-Kubra, center of the Egyptian textile industry, has been wracked by labor actions; during intense periods of trouble there, the government has barred reporters from traveling from Cairo to Mahalla. Farmers across the country have protested low agricultural prices and incomes for some time, and there have been occasional reports of violence related to the farmers' protests. Most trade unions and professional syndicates have grievances; the doctors have protested in the past and now, as noted, it's the pharmacists' turn.

The troubles do not seem to pose a major threat to the government in the short term, but they are clearly a symptom of the international economic situation and Egypt's own economic troubles. With Husni Mubarak now past 80, they may also reflect a growing sense of fin du regime and a staking of claims against his successor, combined with the sense that the government is doing little to ameliorate the economic situation. The government has pursued its traditional approach of reactively appeasing demands by important groups and ignoring those it feels it can.

Egypt is certainly not the only country where major labor unrest has occurred, but as the biggest and most industrialized of the Arab countries, with some of the best organized and long-established professional syndicates, the growing unrest seems worthy of note.

While the unrest probably deserves more attention than it has been accorded in the West, none of this means that Egypt is in some sort of pre-revolutionary situation. Egyptians have long had a stoic acceptance of their government's inability to improve life (and Egypt has a much higher standard of living than it did a generation ago). But with political succession in the offing -- in 2011 assuming Mubarak lives out his term -- the turmoil deserves a certain amount of attention.