Scheduled Strike by Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions

[\"Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions -- Workers and The Revolution -- First Labor Conference -- Wednesday 2 March 2011.\" Image from almasryalyoum.com] [\"Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions -- Workers and The Revolution -- First Labor Conference -- Wednesday 2 March 2011.\" Image from almasryalyoum.com]

Scheduled Strike by Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued in Arabic by the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions on 5 September 2011. It was translated into English and first published as such by the MENA Solidarity Network.]

Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions

Over the coming few days hundreds of thousands of workers will exercise their right to strike and organise sit-ins, in defiance of all attempts to intimidate them and prevent them from exercising these rights, such as the law criminalising strikes and protests. The 22,000 textile workers of Misr Spinning in Mahalla have shown that this law does not frighten them, and it will not prevent the strike that they have set for 10 September demanding a new rate for the minimum wage, a 200% rise in bonuses and increased investment and the provision of the necessary raw materials in order for to the company to operate.

Hundreds of thousands of teachers in six provinces are also threatening to join protests on the same day followed by strikes to demand that their colleagues on temporary contracts are given permanent jobs and a 200% rise in bonuses.

Postal workers in several provinces have already been out on strike this week to demand the restructuring of their wages, increased bonuses, equal recognition for educational qualifications and an end to corruption. Even before Eid, 5,000 workers at Kabu textile mills in Alexandria went on strike demanding that corrupt bosses are brought to justice, the payment of delayed wages and permanent contracts for temporary workers. Staff working in cultural centres demonstrated for raises to their bonuses, permanent contracts for temporary workers, an end to corruption and the sacking of management consultants.

Assistant train drivers on the Cairo Metro organised a strike and sit-in demanding permanent contracts and equal rights for fixed-term workers at Demerdash station yesterday, afterwards transferring their protest to Martyrs’ Station in Tahrir Square.  Today workers at the Aviation Information Centres began an open-ended sit-in calling for the resignation of Mohi Raghib. Meanwhile airport workers are also preparing for a strike and sit-in to bring down the Minister of Civil Aviation and all his crew.

Tens of thousands of workers in the Public Transport Authority are expected to strike on the first day of the school year if the chairman of the authority does not fulfil his promise to raise bonuses by 200%. Health Technicians are also threatening to strike at the end of the month as their demands have not been met, while health institutions and hospitals have been shaken by the anger of workers who have been waiting decades for permanent contracts and the rest of their rights.

Eight months after the victory of the 25 January revolution in getting rid of the dictator Mubarak, continual pressure from the revolutionaries has forced the supposedly revolutionary government to hold a public trial of the tyrant and a small number of the criminals, murderers and corrupt figures closest to him.

But workers have discovered that successive governments do not listen to their demands. For more than four years they have argued for a decent minimum wage and three years ago the rate was calculated three years ago at 1200 pounds a month. Today inflation has driven this figure up to 1500 pounds a month. Yet the governments of businessmen refuse to implement the minimum wage, claiming that there is no money to fund it. They rejected all the serious studies which proved that it is possible to fund a minimum wage with the very same budgets which have allowed the rich to loot and plunder, by setting some limits to exploitation and corruption such as implementing a maximum wage. It is completely illogical that a worker should be paid only 50 pounds a month while employees at the top of the payscale receive a million pounds a month. Likewise, the imposition of progressive taxation on capital gains and other similar mechanisms has been rejected by every so-called revolutionary government, which even tried to avoid implementing the demand for 200% bonuses in the municipalities and the demand for permanent contracts although temporary workers stood outside the ministries and the parliament before and after revolution demanding this.

The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions announces its complete solidarity with workers who are exercising their right to strike and organise sit-ins in defence of their legitimate rights, the foremost of which are:

  1. A minimum wage of no less than 1500 pounds a month and a maximum wage which does not exceed 15 times the minimum, linked to the rate of inflation and price rises.
  2. Permanent appointment of all categories of fixed-term workers, taking into account years already worked.
  3. Scrapping the law criminalizing protests and strikes, and an end to military tribunals for civilians
  4. Immediate implementation of a law on trade union freedoms
  5. All those involved in corruption must be removed and held to account.
  6. Pump funds and raw materials into the Misr Spinning factory and other factories. Re-opening of companies which have been closed by their bosses under workers’ management.
  7. Reinstatement and financial compensation for all workers who have been arbitrarily sacked.
  8. Implementation of the law guaranteeing workers a share in company profits

The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions calls on all workers to organise themselves in unions to express themselves and win their rights, and to unite in order to achieve their legitimate demands.

Strike, strike – its our legitimate right!
Strike against hunger! Strike against poverty!

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412