Intersecting arcs of mobilisation: The transnational trajectories of Egyptian dockers’ unions

Introduction

In February 2011, 1500 workers went on strike at Suez Canal Container Terminal (SCCT) in Port Said, Egypt’s and also Africa’s largest container port. There was no history of independent trade union organisation in the terminal, but the company’s Danish management quickly signed a collective bargaining agreement with the newly formed union committee.

The sudden outbreak of industrial unrest on the docks in Port Said was an early indication of how the Tahrir Square revolt would spread. The events of January 2011 precipitated a wave of wildcat industrial action across the country as the workplace became an important site for political and economic protest, with recognition for independent trade unions becoming a central demand. Before the Tahrir revolt, only three independent unions had been established (Beinin, 2009, 2011). By the end of 2011, an estimated 100 unions representing 1.4 million members had joined the newly formed Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), and strikes had reached unprecedented levels (Alexander, 2012). The foundations of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), which had previously exercised a monopoly on union membership and which was closely associated with the authoritarian practices of the Mubarak regime, were badly shaken.

As this commentary will show, however, the development of independent unions on Egypt’s docks needs to be understood in terms of a set of trajectories that reach far beyond Tahrir Square. While industrial unrest had been steadily rising in Egypt over the past decade (Beinin, 2009), dock workers across the Arab World had also been getting organised. APM Terminals, the operator of SCCT in Port Said, had become a magnet for worker activism, with new unions being formed in Jordan, Bahrain and Morocco in recent years. These advances have been made possible, at least in part, by the specificities of the port industry’s geographical milieu. Ports are not spatially delimited; they are densely woven into transnational flows of trade, capital and also labour solidarity. Dock workers in major Egyptian ports such as Port Said and Sokhna are connected not only to the movements of ships and the investment patterns of transnational corporations, but also to trade unions both near and afar. The struggles such as those of the Port Said workers, then, not only embedded the Tahrir revolt in new spaces, but also shifted it onto new terrain and into different webs of solidarity.

The positionality of Egypt’s ports as receptors of transnational labour solidarity is all the more crucial given the political and industrial pressures that independent unions face. The rapid emergence of Egypt’s independent trade union movement has been impressive, but its political position is far from assured in an environment where the military and the Muslim Brotherhood exercise considerable power. While the presence of transnational capital has opened avenues of labour solidarity, the connections with European capital and commodity flows engender an almost dizzying array of geo-strategic pressures. SCCT, for example, was a flagship development project for APM Terminals, which has been a driving force behind privatisation in the region, and over the past decade has rapidly grown to become the largest port operator in the Mediterranean. Furthermore, SCCT and other new operations such as DP World Sokhna sit on the Suez Canal, which because of European imports from Asia is the world’s busiest shipping lane. Intensifying these links still further are the fact that APM Terminals is the sister company of Maersk Line, the world’s largest container shipping line, and also the importance of the Suez Canal’s smooth functioning to Egyptian government finances (Economist, 2010). As a result, Egypt’s dockers are potentially viewed as a hair trigger for both European logistical systems and Egypt’s public finances. The suggestion here is that, in light of such acute power-geometries, transnational flows of labour solidarity constitute a critical supply line of political influence (cf. Featherstone, 2012).

The growth of dockers’ unions in the Arab World

Since 2007, dockers’ unions across the Arab world have made substantial gains under the aegis of the International Transport Workers’ Federation’s (ITF) Ports of Convenience (POC) campaign. A key impetus for the campaign has been the shifting corporate geography of the global ports industry. By the mid-2000s, nearly half of the world’s container volumes had been concentrated in the hands of just four private operators. Three of the four, APM Terminals, Dubai Ports World (DPW) and Hutchison Port Holdings, operate major terminals in Egypt (Drewry Shipping Consultants, 2008). These ‘Global Network Terminal Operators’ (GNTs) have not only driven the privatisation of the port sector, but also led the development of the port sector in the world’s new trading zones, and often in countries where independent unions are either historically weak or altogether illegal.

The ITF has sought to adapt to this changing geography by building new unions from the ground up. Since 2007 the campaign has had notable organising success in the Arab world in particular, such as with the establishment of new unions and collective bargaining rights at terminals in Jordan in 2007, Bahrain in 2009 and Morocco in 2010 (incidentally, all at facilities operated by APM Terminals) (see ITF, 2009, 2011; ITUC, 2012). New unions have also been established at DPW operations in Yemen and Algeria, and state-owned ports in Iraq.

The significance of these organising gains should not be underestimated. Many trade unions around the world have attempted to revitalise their membership base by investing in organising activities, but often find progress sluggish, not least on account of employer resistance and insufficient legal frameworks (see, for example, Holgate and Simms, 2008). Experience elsewhere in the POC campaign illustrates just how difficult the process can be. In Mumbai, for example, it took the ITF-affiliated union three years to win collective bargaining rights at the new APM Terminals facility, despite well-documented evidence of repeated beatings of union activists by APM’s subcontractors (Osler, 2009).

Assessing the impact of international solidarity

The spate of union organising by dockers’ unions in the Arab world, then, provides an important context for the emergence of unions first at Port Said, and subsequently at other major ports in Egypt. As the largest container terminal in Africa, SCCT in Port Said had long been on the radar of the ITF’s regional office. The ITF had made little progress, however, before 2011. APM Terminals management was unwilling to grant access despite, or perhaps because of, its experience with other dockers’ unions in the region, while even undercover organising methods were considered risky for fear of potential retaliation by the security services.

With the balance of power rapidly shifting in early 2011, however, management agreed to meet with the newly organised workers committee. As Bilal Malkawi, the ITFs Arab world representative, recalls:

[The port manager] said to me, ’Bilal, ever since we signed a signed a collective agreement with the union in Aqaba [Jordan], the union has been going on strike every month, I’m concerned it will be like that here’. But I said to him, ‘Don’t worry, these are Egyptian workers, they are very different to Jordanian workers, if you meet with him I’m sure the outcome will be positive’. But when the negotiation team went in, 300 workers went to the canteen, waiting in anticipation. And then after only twenty minutes of talks, the workers’ representatives broke off the meeting and the workers launched a spontaneous strike.

APM Terminals’ management, had failed to appreciate how the rules of the games had changed. Much like their counterparts across Egypt during and since early 2011, the Port Said workers intended to make the most of the political vacuum created by the crumbling of the repressive apparatus. Then the death of a worker in the port dramatically compounded the workers’ sense of grievance, highlighting all too tragically the consequences of the capital–state nexus under the Mubarak regime:

During the strike a crane driver died as a result of a severe drop in his blood pressure. This made the workers extremely angry, because they thought his death was management’s fault due to the fatigue caused by harsh working conditions. They were so angry they wanted to burn down the terminal, this state of the art facility worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But I went to Port Said and met with the workers. I said ‘Brothers and sisters, this hero has sacrificed his life for your future. We have to take this opportunity to sign the first ever collective bargaining agreement in the history of Egypt’.

The Port Said workers decided to end their strike after three days and sign a collective bargaining agreement. Among the settlement terms included a lengthening of contracts from six months to three years, substantial wage increases, annual leave allowances, and training and safety policies. That such a detailed agreement was able to be agreed so quickly highlights the degree of technical support the ITF was able to provide, not least because of its recent experience of concluding similar agreements throughout the Arab world. This role has continued to expand. The ITF now has a full-time co-ordinator based in Egypt. It has run training workshops for union leaders, and is mentoring the dockers’ unions on how to establish a national federation. Egyptian dockers’ leaders have had a chance to meet and engage with other docker unionists at regional ITF meetings, as well as dockers from all round the world at the ITF’s global dockers’ meeting recently held in Aqaba.

The corporate geography of the port industry has also connected Egyptian dock workers with the previously established industrial power of dockers’ unions internationally. In February 2012, workers at DPW Sokhna launched a sit-in strike over breaches of the collective bargaining agreement signed in September 2011. The situation quickly became tense. The previous September management had called in the army, and several union leaders had also been detained and requested to sign declarations that no further industrial action would take place (they refused). As the strike continued, DPW management threatened to bring in the army again, something which seemed a distinct possibility given the law passed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) (the interim political authority controlled by the military) in June 2011 outlawing strikes in essential industries and the ports strategic location on the Suez Canal. To make matters worse, DPW’s management accused the ITF and Bilal Malkawi directly of inciting the strike and threatening Egypt’s national security (Bilal Malkawi, 2012, personal communication).

These attempts to separate the DPW Sokhna workers from their international allies were ultimately unsuccessful as the ITF successfully mobilised. After a call was put out to the ITF’s dockers’ communication network, 93 messages of protest were sent to DPW Sokhna management. Unions at DPW terminals in Southampton (UK) and Mumbai (India) went one step further and held meetings with their local management, indicating that if the response was not resolved in Egypt then it might spread to Europe and India respectively. The union in Mumbai also attempted to make the most of its personal relationship with the chief executive DPW Sokhna, who had previously managed the DPW operation in Mumbai, giving their message a personal impact (ITF, 2012b). The ITF also wrote to the Egyptian Prime Minister, Kamal al-Ganzoury, and a sent more strongly worded protest to DPW headquarters in Dubai. After 10 days of sit-in strikes, the Sokhna workers won an agreement granting conditions comparable to those of their Port Said counterparts (ITF, 2012a).

Concluding remarks

The development path of unions in Port Said and Sokhna shows both sides of the power equation for dock workers in Egypt. One the one hand, it shows that the recent gains of dockers’ unions across the Egypt was possible at least in part because the ground had already been prepared. Unions in Port Said and Sokhna were able to draw on the ITF and other dockers’ unions in the region for training and advice. Moreover, the Port Said and Sokhna disputes illustrate an unintended consequence of the port industry’s consolidation, as Egyptian dockers were able to tap into the power and influence of dockers’ unions in other spheres (Anderson, 2009). These flows have come in both ‘softer’ and ‘harder’ forms: the utilisation of existing relations with management at Port Said or the more confrontational insistence from unions around the world as they supported their counterparts at Sokhna.

On the other hand, the management’s portrayal of the ITF as an external threat to national security illustrates the difficult political environment in which Egyptian unions operate, one which threatens to disconnect unions from their international allies. The attacks from DPW management were relatively measured compared with the smears which have been made by the ETUF and some media commentators, which have regularly characterised the ITF as a Zionist agent (Bilal Malkawi, 2012, personal communication). These attacks have not been targeted at the ITF exclusively, but have been extended to other international organisations such as the other Global Union Federations, the International Trade Union Confederation and even the International Labour Organization.

Although these attacks are an obvious attempt to stoke nationalist paranoia, they have nonetheless induced the independent union movement to act with caution. In an apparent attempt to insulate itself from these claims, EFITU took a decision in 2011 that member unions should not accept any financial assistance from external organisations, including trade unions (Aita, 2011). Although this has had little impact in practice, within the ITF there is concern that the participation of dockers’ unions in ITF activities, such as attendance at national and international meetings and training events, is being curtailed by the intense scrutiny of international organisations.

Such issues may appear minor in one sense, yet they reveal the uncertain position of Egypt’s unions despite their impressive gains since January 2011. In SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood, the independent union in Egypt is up against two forces with a considerable historical, organisational and institutional head start (Teti, 2011). Although EFITU was quick to emerge as a national organisation, it has yet to generate a political presence capable of defending even its core gains. For example, the legal status of independent unions is currently under threat from a Muslim Brotherhood-backed draft law that may force them to merge back into the ETUF (Dale, 2012).

The power asymmetries faced by the new dockers’ unions are not uncommon for working-class movements, but they highlight why it is so crucial that Egyptian unions have full access to the material and industrial resources of the international labour movement. Egypt’s docks, then, have become a key space of contest; one where workers, along with assistance from their international allies, have sought to transform the Tahrir revolt into political and economic gains in the workplace; but equally a site where the both traditional and emerging forces hostile to this movement are vigilant. The Port Said and Sokhna disputes show that dockers’ unions are well placed to capitalise on these links. Whether Egypt will continue to be viewed as the latest advance in the ITF’s POC campaign is likely to depend on the developing strength of dockers’ unions both within and beyond Egypt’s borders.