Class Capacity and Cross-Gender Solidarity: Women’s Organizing in an Egyptian Textile Company

The 1984–88 Strikes

Starting in 1984, workers organized marches, demanding wage supplements and the democratization of unions. Workers often marched outside the company and sometimes occupied it, and the state responded with substantial force. In February 1986 workers organized a strike and requested a Friday paid day off and other wage supplements. In September 1988 protests erupted when Mubarak revoked the school grant supplement. It is noteworthy that women’s participation in the strikes between 1986 and 1988 was on an individual basis and ancillary to the strikes. The women lacked organizational capacities and a cadre of women leaders. Rather than developing solidarities with women, men had in fact protested the employment of women in what they saw as “traditionally male” departments.

I interviewed women who had worked in various departments in the 1980s. Women workers were largely concentrated in clothing, which accounted for around 1,500 out of 3,500 workers. The rest of the women were spread across the company. In one spinning department, for example, there were around 1,500 men and 100 women. ⁴³ Women from all departments took part in the protest, but they discussed participating in the 1980s strike as individuals, not as part of a women’s collective. Manar, employed in spinning production at the time, recalled that “in the 1986 strike, workers marched while carrying a coffin for Mubarak and chanted ‘Mubarak what did you do? A kilo of rice is one pound, Mubarak what did you do? A kilo of meat is at ten pounds.’ I participated and chanted.” ⁴⁴ Others heard from the guards about the strike and decided to go home.

Women in the clothing departments played a bigger role but one ancillary to the strike. They organized mostly in response to the arrest of their husbands (large numbers of couples work in the company). In 1986, after the strike, some of the men were arrested, and their wives started screaming and running after them. Husam, a retired male Communist leader of the 1980s strike, explained that after the arrest, women went to their work stations, and “the wives of the arrested workers organized a go-slow and chanted ‘release before production’ in the clothing department.” ⁴⁵

Women workers, Husam said, were contacted through a Communist Party member. Women did not develop a cadre of leaders, but one woman stands out. She organized the go-slow, distributed leaflets, and helped form a “relief committee” to collect money for the families of the arrested workers. This woman leader came up with the idea of the relief committee, and opposition parties provided aid for the workers. As the workers were arrested for around forty days, their wives and children needed support. It was this one woman, then, a radical party member, who played a leading role.

Rather than bolstering their scarce organizational capacities in the second round of strikes in 1988, women became even less active. Women explained to me that they sat out the 1988 strikes, and some workers indicated that the women got used to the idea of their husbands being arrested. Fadi, another leading worker from the 1980s, told me that

unlike today, in 1986 and 1988 women did not have a leading role. The majority of women who participated in the first big day in 1986 were the wives of the men in the company and mostly worked in the clothing departments. They played a role after the arrest of their husbands. During the second strike in 1988, women did not participate at all. ⁴⁶

In addition, men and women did not cultivate cross-gender solidarities. In fact, in the 1980s, as Egyptian male workers started migrating to Iraq in search of better job opportunities, and women in Mahalla replaced men in the company, taking on traditionally male positions in the spinning and weaving departments and working the night shifts, male workers protested. Husam recalled that “we [the informal workers committee] used to raise this in all of our marches in the 1980s, but the management and the official union did nothing about it.” ⁴⁷ Men workers argued that, by law, women were not allowed to work night shifts; it was not suitable for married women and it caused social problems, such as allegations of infidelity. Many of the male workers repeated the story of a man who had called the factory to ask about his wife, only to find out that she was not a night-shift worker. Women, however, neither mobilized against their own employment in the spinning departments nor resisted it. They proudly recalled that they used to achieve higher productivity levels (this was also confirmed by male workers); but they also affirmed that it was difficult for married women to do shift work. It is plausible that men felt threatened by the influx of women into “their” traditional departments in the 1980s, probably because management was able to enforce higher levels of productivity among the women.

The relatively low level of participation and the limited leadership and ancillary roles played by women workers in the 1980s are supported by my archival newspaper research and by secondary sources. ⁴⁸ El-Shafei confirms that in 1986 women in the clothing department demonstrated and chanted “release before production” to demand the liberation of their arrested husbands. In order to avoid further labor unrest, El-Shafei explains, the company decided to release the detained workers and meet the demand for a Friday holiday. A left-wing worker group, the Workers Defense Committee, El-Shafei says, organized the 1986 strike. ⁴⁹ In all these corroborating reports about the 1986 strike in Mahalla, women seem to have played a supportive role mainly by demanding the release of their husbands.

It is even more telling that neither al-Ahaly nor other news outlets that discuss the history of workers’ strikes in Mahalla mention the role played by women at Mahalla in the second strike in 1988. In one of al-Ahaly’s extensive reports on the 1988 strike, “The Winds of Bread Uprising Approach Mahalla,” the strike is described as the most heated since the bread riots of 1977. ⁵⁰ There is, however, no mention of women. As my interviews indicate, women did not play any particular role in 1988. The absence of reporting on women in Mahalla in 1988 is telling: al-Ahaly consistently reported on women’s worker mobilizations in Egypt in the 1980s. For example, women workers and the wives of men workers at a carpet company in Mahalla city organized a women’s march to the company headquarters and demanded the release of their husbands in November 1986. They also chanted “release before production,” apparently in imitation of Mahalla women a few months earlier. ⁵¹ Had women in Mahalla played additional roles in the 1980s, it would have most likely been reported by al-Ahaly. The absence of reporting confirms the absence of women’s collective mobilizations in the strikes of 1988.

It is interesting that although the strikes in the 1980s were not sanctioned by the official union, the General Trade Union of Textile, Garments, and Cotton Ginning eventually demanded that the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) intervene to stop the persecution of Mahalla workers after ten workers were transferred following the 1988 strike. ⁵² Thus the union can be seen to have provided workers some cover. It is important to point out that, unlike some of the men, not a single woman worker was transferred as a result of the 1980s strikes.

The 2006–8 Strikes

Interviews with workers revealed that the 2006 strike was instigated by a government document, signed by the prime minister and circulated among workers, stating that workers had the right to bonuses equivalent to two-months’ wages. The company, however, ignored this policy. Around thirty male workers in different groups and factories started discussing the possibility of a strike. Detecting widespread receptiveness to the idea, they distributed leaflets about the two-month bonus that urged workers to gather on the morning of December 7 to march toward the company headquarters and reject their underpayment. Women participated in the strikes as a group, played central roles in the strike’s commencement, developed their organizational capacities between 2006 and 2007, and generated a cadre of leading women. Further, cross-gender solidarity was apparent throughout the strikes.

Only a few men organized for this action, and participation was largely spontaneous. None of the 5,000 women concentrated in clothing were involved in prior organizing, but once they got word of it they discussed joining. Manar explained, “When we heard about the strikes we were thrilled. We know that strikes start from the men’s spinning department and we started asking about the strike leaders in order to make contact with them.” ⁵³ As soon as they heard the first chants, women workers immediately joined in great numbers and incited men to join. Amira recalled:

I do not know where I got the strength from. I took out the women from my factory and we went down and Manar was supposed to bring other women. As we left the gates we saw the men confused, standing by, unsure whether to join. We chanted: ‘Women are here! Where are the men?’ I then appealed to them by opening my hands and signaling to them to come closer and I started chanting ‘God is great’ and everybody repeated it after me. ⁵⁴

The chant “Women are here! Where are the men?” sealed Mahalla women workers’ reputation for activism and bravery across Egypt. Women’s roles were central to the commencement of the 2000s strikes. They participated as a group and were the first to join in large numbers. Leading women planned to participate in advance of the strike and incited men to join as well.

The strike continued for three days before management conceded and gave workers their two-months’ bonuses. Workers accepted, but they had in the meantime made other demands, such as increases in the basic salary. In September 2007, as the Muslim holiday season of Ramadan approached and those new strike demands had not been met, workers prepared for another round of confrontation.

Women’s organizing and leadership grew following the success of the first strike in 2006. The weeklong sit-in that started on September 23, 2007, was more organized than the first strike in December, and women were central to making it happen. Only women workers had access to the clothing departments, and they organized them by leafleting in the cafeteria and explaining to their coworkers why they should strike. The organizers not only made sure that women in the clothing department were on board with the strike but also approached the men in their sections: “On the day of the strike in 2007 we went to the preparation departments [the few mixed departments to which women had access] and asked the men to stop their machines; we made sure the strike was taking place.” ⁵⁵ A male strike leader recalled that women would even approach men workers and say, “Why don’t you participate? Are you not a man?” ⁵⁶

One notable aspect of this strike is that women workers brought their families to the company, and around 120 women stayed there overnight with their male counterparts. In the context of Mahalla that was radical, and some of the women paid a hefty social price for it as rumors spread about misbehavior. The striking women, however, also took on the traditional roles of cooking and providing food for all striking workers. The company was “occupied” by the families of workers, and, as is often the case when women participate, the whole community became involved in the strike. ⁵⁷

Significantly, women also developed a cadre of women leaders. One of the older women in the company explained that there were six prominent women leaders and around thirty women overall who played roles in the 2000s. ⁵⁸ Areej’s description is revealing:

There are women leaders who speak in negotiations. In factory number one everyone listened to Manar and followed her. She had a group of women that followed her, about fifty; and those fifty brought in another fifty. She knew things we did not know and explained things to us. We loved her; she is a courageous woman. ⁵⁹

Thus, women leaders had gained the following of a large number of women. Although male strike leaders dominated, prominent women leaders participated in informal committees, conducted meetings at their homes, and traveled to Cairo for union meetings and negotiations as well.

Cross-gender solidarity was also apparent throughout the strike. Men often identified with women’s suffering: “Women work under severe conditions and they suffer from back problems. They also have to go back to their houses and work.” ⁶⁰ Men also repeatedly told women that their participation was valuable, and they promoted women leaders. Ahmad, for example, told me that “I wanted Manar and Amira [two leading women workers] to appear in the media and participate in negotiations.” ⁶¹ Women and men workers were keen to describe how their solidarity empowered them in the face of management, and most women were confident that their participation prevented a violent response by the security forces.

The Mahalla strikes were also unique because of the groundbreaking demand workers made for independent unionism. For the first time since the incorporation of the ETUF into the state apparatus in the 1960s, Mahalla workers questioned its legitimacy by lobbying for the creation of an independent union and collecting large numbers of signatures from workers. Female leaders also collected signatures from women endorsing the idea. Although Mahalla workers did not in the end form an independent union, by 2009 their demand had paved the way for other workers in Egypt to form autonomous organizations. ⁶²

The fact that the state did not employ repression at the outset of the 2006 strikes had an impact on the development of the strikes and the radicalization of strikers’ demands. But women played a leading role from day one, before it became clear that the state would not use force. The state nevertheless managed eventually to split the workers’ informal committee, co-opt some of the strike leaders, and then use repression against workers and the population of the city on April 6, 2008. One strike leader was dismissed, and five others, including two prominent women leaders, were transferred, suffering huge wage reductions as well. It is telling that during the 2000s the General Trade Union of Textile, Garments, and Cotton Ginning did nothing to support the workers.

The Growing Importance of Clothing and the Feminization of the Industry

The gradual phase-out in the mid-1990s of the Multifiber Arrangement, which secured quotas in the markets of developed countries, reduced the prices of textiles and clothing and gave an advantage to more efficient producers, such as China and India. ⁶⁴ The clothing industry also faced particular competitive pressures in the 1990s, such as branding, vicious price competition, and concentration in the retail sector, which resulted in immense pressures to reduce labor costs and induced investors to relocate to Global South countries in search of cheap female labor. ⁶⁵

Tighter international competition and the adoption of the Egyptian Reform and Structural Adjustment Policies (ERSAP) in the 1990s restructured the industry in the country. Restructuring led to an increase both in the export of clothing relative to textiles and in the numbers of women employed in their manufacture. Historically, the Egyptian textile industry enjoyed protections under the import substitution model, and Egypt exported mostly textiles and yarn. Until the 1980s the government-run textile industry was the main purchaser of Egyptian cotton, which was spun locally and turned into fabrics and clothing to be sold in the local markets for a social price. As Egypt neoliberalized its economy, subsidies for clothing production for the internal market were terminated, and in 1994, as the market for cotton was liberalized, prices rose, increasing production costs in the sector. As a result, larger amounts of cottons, in the form of lint, were sold in international markets instead of going into the country’s clothing value-added chain. Many local mills were idled, and the level of textile export earnings declined significantly in the 1990s. ⁶⁶ Nonetheless, the industry is still very important for the Egyptian economy. For example, in 2008, the industry accounted for 26.4 percent of industrial production, its total value added was LE 33.5 billion, and it accounted for nearly 10 percent of the country’s exports. In addition, the textiles and clothing industry is the largest single employer. At around 400,000, it accounts for a quarter of the industrial labor force, the majority in private companies, as explained earlier. ⁶⁷

It is significant that the decline in the exports of textiles since the 1980s was accompanied by an increase in the export of clothing. Private investors ramped up production of clothing for export, tapping into Egypt’s large reserve of cheap female labor. Indeed, according to World Trade Organization figures for the ratio of clothing exports to textiles, exports grew from around 1 percent in the 1980s to 56 percent in 1997 and 86 percent by 2006 (see Fig. 2).

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Figure 2.

Ratio of Clothing Exports to Textile Exports, 1980–2014.

And although the state sector accounted for around 90 percent of textile and clothing production in the 1970s, its share declined to 35 percent in 2003. The state sector lagged farthest behind in the production of clothing: 14.4 percent in comparison to 85.5 percent in the private sector in 2003. ⁶⁸ It is interesting that the state sector invested in clothing production equipment to a greater degree than other equipment. ⁶⁹ It was, therefore, striving to catch up with the private sector in producing and exporting clothing.

Neoliberal restructuring did not initially feminize industries in Egypt. Indeed, nongovernmental-wage employment for women decreased from 13 percent in 1988 to 10 percent by 1998. ⁷⁰ The process of defeminization took place in most job categories, including all manufacturing jobs but excluding textiles, in which women’s participation remained stable between 1988 and 1998. ⁷¹ However, feminization did eventually catch up, mainly in clothing. The trend started to reverse after 1998, and women’s share reached 11 percent of nongovernmental-wage employment. ⁷² The slight increase in nongovernmental-wage employment between 1998 and 2006 can be largely accounted for by the feminization of the textile and clothing and the food processing industries. ⁷³ Female share in textiles and clothing doubled between 1998 and 2006, from 15 percent to 30 percent. ⁷⁴ In clothing, women make up the majority of employees, earning 78 percent of men’s hourly wages in the industry. ⁷⁵ The textile industry in Egypt thus responded to growing opportunities in the production of clothing for export by taking advantage of cheap female labor.

Similar to the local and global trends in the 1990s, management at Mahalla slowly started to transfer women to clothing from other departments and to transfer men out, suggesting that they were keen to have a women-only force in clothing production. In the 1980s, there were 7,000 women in the company, 1,500 of whom worked in the clothing departments alongside men. ⁷⁶ In spinning, women worked on spinning machines, and, like men, they had to do shift work. By 2000, the overwhelming majority of the company’s 5,000 women laborers worked in clothing alongside a tiny minority of male engineers and mechanics. Women’s testimonies and reports on the textile industry in Mahalla confirm that, by the 2000s, no women worked in the spinning departments in Mahalla. ⁷⁷ As Mahalla is a very conservative city, however, that does not mean that men and women were freely socializing in the 1980s.

It is also important to note that although there is formally equal pay for equal work in Mahalla, women earn less than men—the result of job classifications—with the real average being 450 pounds in comparison to around 600 pounds per month for men. Women’s testimonies also confirmed that management was able to exact high productivity levels from them. The women explained that they produced more per day than they were required to, that they incurred the highest penalties in wage reductions, and that because some women do not know how to read their checks, they were probably taking a pay hit.

What these changes meant, however, was that women were positioned in some of the most productive departments. The men at Mahalla explained to me that, as is the general trend in textiles industries described above, many machines stand idle, and spinning and clothing are the most productive sectors in the company.

In sum, tighter international competition for Egyptian textiles and clothing and the country’s adoption of structural adjustment policies led to a decline in the exports of textiles, prompting employers to ramp up the production of clothing for export and employing larger numbers of women to do so. In Mahalla, this transformation was associated with the transfer of men out of clothing departments and their replacement by women. Women were thus positioned in the most productive departments of the company. When the strikes of the 2000s erupted, the unexpected happened: women showed unprecedented levels of organizing. How did the concentration of women in extremely despotic departments of the company result in their increased organizing? How were they able to transform aspects of their subordination into tools for organizing their workplaces?

Women’s Organizing: Valued Sectors, Workplace Status, and Close Networks

I will show that the concentration of women in clothing empowered them to challenge management because it led to changes in women’s consciousness. First, workers in these women-only spaces became aware that occupying crucial export sectors gave them greater disruptive capacity. Second, women-only spaces translated into higher workplace status for individual women. Third, it led to the development of closer networks based on common grievances and shared identity. I will describe below more precisely how this empowerment happened.

Although the total number of women working in Mahalla has decreased because of layoffs in the state sector, when they described their work women repeatedly said, “Now we are many,” indicating that women were important and accounted for a large percentage of the labor force. In addition, throughout my interviews, women’s emphasis on the export of their garments indicated that they were aware of the importance of their production line. They said, for example, “My section is for shirts that are exported to foreign countries like the US and Europe, high-quality shirts,” ⁷⁸ and “We are the best department, we export our products. Very clean work. We are known for our good quality.” ⁷⁹ Women thus proudly described the importance of their exporting departments in the company.

The burgeoning market for clothing also resulted in very strong demands from the employers for increased productivity, which, I argue, also contributed to women’s motivation to join the strikes. Manar recalled that

it was really painful; the pressure was very high and they were always increasing the targets for productivity. We accepted the reality as it is and agreed to everything they [management] said. We did not pray, we did not eat, we did not leave the machines at all. We had no awareness, no courage, and we were afraid to talk. Things changed after the strike, because we learned the culture of defiance. ⁸⁰

Women thus were aware of the importance of the clothing departments for exports and were keen to gain power to resist the constant demands for higher output. Most women I interviewed mentioned their ability to resist productivity demands and punishments after the strikes.

Moreover, women’s involvement was crucial for the success of the strike. Women account for a quarter of the labor force and work in important and productive departments. As explained earlier, the public sector suffered from large numbers of idle mills, and workers in Mahalla confirm that spinning and clothing are the most productive departments in the factory. And although the company was vertically integrated, workers knew that there were large quantities of stored fabric in the company. The clothing departments could continue working, then, even if the spinning and textile workers struck.

Working in all-women spaces empowered women by elevating their workplace status. It meant that women controlled all the production positions and performed the skilled jobs formerly occupied by men, such as working the scissor machine. Women proudly explained, “There used to be men on the heavy iron and scissor machines. This changed since the 1990s, and it is all women who work on the iron.” ⁸¹ Higher workplace status meant more power and higher organizational capacity. Women were aware that their new position gave them disruptive power.

The all-women spaces also allowed for the development of close networks based on common grievances and a shared identity. These have been shown to benefit marginalized groups ⁸² and also to be important in explaining strike participation. ⁸³ Monira told me how network building in women-only spaces contributed to their organizing:

In the second strike we told each other we would not be entering the company. All seventy women eat together in one room, everything is said during breakfast. During the bus ride, our women also used to talk about the strike with women from other factories. As workers, nobody cares about us, and we did not expect that we could beat the government. I cried when I saw the scenes. ⁸⁴

Women-only spaces allowed women to network and organize for the strike away from managers and other potential male competitors. Women also labored under a harsh system of penalization in the form of wage reductions, and some of their departments were rife with favoritism and sexual harassment. They understood that this was unique to their departments. Managers, women said, often wanted to be “treated like gods and to be loved.” This contributed to women’s sense of common injustice and shared identity. They often said of their relationships, “We are like one big family.” Before the strikes, women supported each other by creating informal funds (jam’ya) to support women in need. They also formed solidarities to confront abuse by managers and helped each other with productivity targets to avoid penalties. As Monira affirms,

We have something called a friendship fund. We help each other in times of need. If one of us has a baby or is getting married, we support her. If someone is going on retirement, we bring her a present. We spent most of the time together. If one of the women refused to participate in the strike she would be rebuked by her coworkers. The strike is for the benefit of everyone. ⁸⁵

The concentration of women in clothing helped them form a group identity, which translated into solidarity that aided women in secretly leafleting and disseminating information about strike details, encouraging them to join the strikes as a bloc. It is also very significant that the close networks in the women-only spaces and the lack of competition from dominant male leaders fostered the development of a cadre of women leaders, as described above.

Cross-Gender Solidarity: Men’s Organizational Dependence and the Decline in Corporatism

The concentration of women in competitive clothing departments facilitated the development of cross-gender solidarity. Men also understood that women now occupied important and productive departments of the company, which increased men’s dependence on women’s activism. At the same time, the growing crisis in state-labor relations in the 2000s obstructed men’s ability to advance their interest from within the union. This induced men to search for other routes of influence, and it may also have encouraged them to search for solidarities with their lower-status women coworkers (see Table 3).

The concentration of women in closed and competitive departments influenced men. As Mousa recalled:

Clothing and spinning are the most productive departments in the company. I did not expect women to participate. A friend of mine called me and said clothing went down, and they are touring other departments to get workers out. When I heard that they participated I went down. This move by the women was explosive. ⁸⁶

This is especially important because, as some of the men I interviewed explained, the company was not working at full capacity and many machines stood idle. Because women occupied one of the most productive departments in the company, men understood that the success of the strike depended on their participation.

In addition, all men explained that the clothing departments operated behind locked doors to which they lacked access. This made organizing a much larger challenge and increased men’s reliance on women’s organizing. As described earlier, men also encouraged women’s leadership. Farid said, “We always searched for contacts in the women’s clothing departments.” Interviews with women also revealed that men were keen on getting women involved in organizing, Soriya recalled:

Men used to tell us that you have to be present with us and support us. Woman is the backbone of her man. Now the focus is on women. In fact, men said that the strike will not succeed without you, and that women in the company are braver than men; they are the ones who are men. During the first strike they asked us not to go home. ⁸⁷

Manar also recalled that on the first day of the strike in 2006 “men started talking about the role of women and how men and women should support each other. They told us that, if we want the strike to succeed, we have to be serious about participating. And that if we go home, the strike will fail. This encouraged us to stay.” ⁸⁸

Clearly, men were motivating women and making sure they participated. Men workers understood that women’s participation and leadership worked to their benefit. It is also significant that the 2000s women were working in important departments; some of them had become empowered and gained confidence after years of working in the company, which may partly explain why they were being treated as coworkers by men. Some of the young women who had been employed in the 1990s did take leadership roles. It is no surprise, however, that the two most prominent women leaders who took part in the negotiations were older, more experienced, and had worked for the company for over twenty years. The fact that women workers identified mainly as mothers and explained that their primary motive for working was to provide for their children did not stop them from developing working-class consciousness. ⁸⁹ Men in the company often expressed conservative and patriarchal views, but they nevertheless developed solidarity with women both as mothers and coworkers. As Mousa, for example, acknowledged, “Women get tired at work, and their husbands do not have mercy on them at home.” ⁹⁰ During the strike, women partly legitimized their demands on the basis of their domestic roles. But, significantly, they also developed working-class consciousness and adopted a cross-gender workers’ rights discourse. This is partly consistent with the work of Plankey-Videla and Ching Kwan Lee. Plankey-Videla finds that participation in the strike for women workers changed what it meant to be a mother. Women’s identities as mothers shifted to one of being mothers and workers, with the right to participate in both private and public spheres in order to defend workers’ rights as citizens. ⁹¹ Lee shows that when women are older and have more work experience, and labor markets are tight, their identity as “matrons” improved their shop-floor negotiating power and facilitated the development of a hegemonic factory regime. ⁹²

In Mahalla, women faced different circumstances. Labor markets were loose, and women endured a despotic factory regime. But their long experience and higher work status did indeed have an effect on their confidence levels and on how men perceived them as well.

Women’s increasingly important roles in the company and the confidence gained after years of work may well have contributed to men’s solidarity with them. But there was another important factor facilitating that process. My interviews with men indicate that changes in union politics in the 2000s had a large impact on the strikes in Mahalla. Men were concerned that they no longer could advance their interests through official union routes, and they were searching for alternative strategies, one of which was the attempt to form an independent union. The solidarity men forged with their women coworkers might be seen as another way in which they were trying to advance their interests.

One of the cornerstones of the regime’s corporatist institutions, the ETUF, underwent significant changes in the 2000s that, scholars have shown, partly explain the rise in labor unrest in Egypt. ⁹³ Official unionism had gone through serial transformations after Sadat’s infitah (opening-up) liberalization policies in the 1970s, but the pace of privatization and the attack on workers’ rights have intensified with the acceleration of neoliberal policies in the 2000s. ⁹⁴ In fact, Agnieszka Paczynska argues that until the 1990s, the ETUF played a role in forestalling the advance of neoliberal policies. ⁹⁵ Even if that is an overstatement, ⁹⁶ there are significant differences between the conduct and role of the ETUF in the 1980s and in the 2000s.

By the 2000s workers’ ability to find avenues for influence and power within unions had been blocked. In the 1980s, union membership grew, even relative to the 1970s, reaching 35.8 percent of the workforce. ⁹⁷ This growth enhanced the financial standing of the federation and opened opportunities for nepotism. In comparison, by 2006 union density had declined to 20.8 percent of wage workers. ⁹⁸ By the early 2000s, the federation also declared its unequivocal support for the acceleration of neoliberal policies and endorsed the new Unified Labor Law of 2003. The new labor code gave employers complete freedom, allowing them for example to reduce protections against summary dismissal, ⁹⁹ negating the little leverage that remained to official unions vis-à-vis employers and the state. Indeed, Fadi explained to me that in the 2000s “the official union could no longer even meet workers’ simple requests.” ¹⁰⁰

The change in ETUF representativeness could also be inferred from union election dynamics. The official trade union structure is pyramidal in Egypt, with a general ETUF board of directors, twenty-three boards of directors for the different industries, and 1,850 local trade union committees. In the 1987 election round, Marsha Pripstein Posusney shows, the process was vibrant at the local level, and even the left increased its presence. Al-Tajamoa (the opposition party) and the independent left were able to promote 400 candidates, and nearly half of them won. The elections in the 2000s looked very different. Exclusion was severe; hundreds of candidates were banned from running in 2001 and thousands in 2006, reaching unprecedented levels. ¹⁰¹ Workers who represented the interest of their colleagues at the local level were completely blocked from entering the union.

These changes were reflected in the 2005 union elections, an additional factor triggering the strike in Mahalla. Mousa said that “in earlier periods one could find a couple of representatives on the union committee that supported workers’ interests, but in the recent election they did not allow any to be on the board.” ¹⁰² It was well known, workers explained to me, that fourteen of the twenty-one local union committee members were chosen by the security services and company managers. Workers were usually able to elect the remaining seven representatives. But in the 2006 elections, even that was not possible. The elections also exposed the state’s biases. Samer told me, “Since 2005 it was clear to me that the state is biased toward the business class.” ¹⁰³

Male workers understood that they could no longer mount struggles from within the official state corporatist union. Most workers testified that the union elections had “a huge impact” on the commencement of the 2006 strike. In fact, a significant number of the 2006 strike leaders had been candidates in the 2005 elections who were either obstructed from running or lost.

Men lobbied for an independent union to advance their interests, but developing solidarity with women coworkers in the company may have also been an effort to gain leverage. In his work on cultures of solidarity, Rick Fantasia writes that solidarities “tend to emerge only when workers or employers circumvent routine channels and workers seek, or are forced, to rely on their mutual solidarity as the basis for their power.” ¹⁰⁴ Ellena Van Dyke further shows that coalitions are more likely to form when groups face risks and their interests are jeopardized. ¹⁰⁵ In Mahalla, solidarity took the form of cross-gender organizing. As Samer explained, “It was this solidarity during the sit-in and the media attention it attracted that ‘terrified management.’” ¹⁰⁶

In sum, the same structural factors contributed to women’s organizing and to men’s support for women’s activism. The concentration of women in the clothing departments in the 2000s changed women’s consciousness and empowered them because they now worked in valued sectors, enjoyed elevated work status, and developed close networks. Men also understood the importance of the clothing departments and needed the support of women in the gated spaces in order to organize the strike. In addition, the decline in union representativeness and in the institutional role of official unions in Egypt may have helped foster cross-gender solidarity in Mahalla.