Nadine Abdalla, Labor Against the Regime: Workers Mobilizations in Egypt (2004 – 2011) (Syracuse University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Nadine Abdalla (NA): When I started my PhD in 2008, Egypt felt paralyzed. Politics seemed frozen, and nothing gave the impression that change was on the horizon. Yet, beneath this stillness, something unexpected was happening. Since 2004, waves of labor protests had been spreading—hundreds of them across the country. For the first time in years, I felt a tremor of possibility. It was as if something in society had finally begun to stir. I was not only observing this moment from afar; I had been writing about these protests since their earliest days, documenting how workers were carving out spaces of defiance in a system that seemed unshakable.
I could not help but wonder: could labor be the force that drives change in Egypt? The thought immediately took me to Poland where the Solidarity movement had been central to democratization in the 1980s. Polish workers, by forging an alliance with the intelligentsia, had managed to transform their activism—and that alliance—into a powerful political force. Could Egyptian workers do the same? Was I witnessing the birth of a movement that might challenge the regime in ways that political parties had failed to do?
Driven by these questions, I immersed myself in the literature on Solidarity. I read about the strikes in Gdańsk, the charisma of Lech Wałęsa, and the way workers had become a symbol of national resistance. But the more I read, the more I realized that Egypt was not Poland. The political context, the relationship between workers and the state, the very fabric of society—it was all different. The comparison collapsed under its own weight.
That realization was a turning point. I decided to study Egypt’s labor movement on its own terms. To listen to the voices of workers, to trace their struggles in the factories and streets, and to understand their strategies in relation to their own history and conditions. That was the true beginning of my journey. In 2009, I began my fieldwork and later developed it into my PhD thesis, which I submitted in 2014. This book is the result of that research.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
NA: Over the years, I have written several articles on the features and characteristics of labor protests that spread in Egypt since 2004. As my research deepened, I found myself particularly drawn to two cases that would later become the core of this book: the workers’ movement at the Misr Company for Spinning and Weaving in Mahalla al-Kubra (2006–2008) and the employees’ movement of the Real Estate Tax Collectors (RETA) (2007–2009). These two movements captured my attention not only because of their scale and visibility, but also because they opened new questions for me as a researcher. They pushed me to look beyond the immediate moment of protest and to explore the strategies, choices, and interactions that shaped their trajectories. Writing about them in this book is thus both a continuation of my longstanding interest in labor and a response to the questions these particular movements compelled me to ask.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
NA: As mentioned above, in this book, I analyze two major case studies: the workers’ movement at the Misr Company for Spinning and Weaving in Mahalla al-Kubra (2006-2008), and the employees’ movement of the Real Estate Tax Collectors (RETA) (2007-2009). What makes these two cases particularly puzzling is that, before 2011, Egypt witnessed countless labor protests, yet most of them followed a predictable pattern. They were typically short-lived, often failed to secure their economic demands, and rarely—if ever—dared to confront the regime directly. For the most part, workers limited their struggles to narrow financial claims, such as demands for bonuses, incentives, or food allowances.
By contrast, the Mahalla textile workers (2006-2008) and the RETA movement (2007-2009) stand out. Not only did they succeed in achieving concrete financial gains, but they also crossed a crucial threshold: they openly challenged the authority of the Mubarak regime itself. This dual achievement—economic success combined with political defiance—sets them apart from the broader wave of labor unrest that marked the decade and makes them central to understanding the dynamics of protest in Egypt on the eve of the 2011 uprising.
Against this background, in this book, I address the following research questions: First, how did the Mahalla labor movement and the RETA emerge and succeed in mobilizing under the authoritarian regime of Mubarak? Second, how and why did both movements choose to openly oppose the regime and challenge the patron-client relationship it had long maintained with workers? And third, why did the RETA succeed in establishing Egypt’s first independent union in December 2008, while the Mahalla movement, after its bold call for a minimum wage during the 6 April 2008 strike, was violently repressed and eventually demobilized?
To answer these questions, I argue that leadership strategies, tactics, and decisions—shaped by leaders’ biographies, their relation to politics, and the degree of social support they commanded within their movements—played a decisive role. These factors influenced both the internal dynamics of the movements and their external interactions with the state, within the authoritarian context of Mubarak’s regime (2006-2010) and on the eve of its eventual collapse in 2011.
When I began this project, I knew I wanted to ground it in social movement theory and the study of contentious politics. But which framework could truly capture the complexity of these struggles in Egypt? I eventually found my answer in the Strategic Interaction Paradigm (SIP), developed by Jasper and Duyvendak in 2015. What drew me to the SIP was its contrast with earlier approaches, such as the Political Process Model, which emphasized structures and institutions but left little space for the agency of actors. Those approaches felt too rigid and non-relational. The SIP, by contrast, is dynamic and interactive. It centers on the constant give-and-take of strategy, showing how movements and states interact, adapt, and respond to one another in real time. This seemed much closer to the reality I was observing. Of course, the SIP is usually applied to democratic contexts. My challenge—and my opportunity—was to use it differently: to see what it could reveal about how movements strategize and improvise under authoritarian rule. Could it help me understand how Egyptian activists navigated such a constrained environment, where every move came with both risks and possibilities?
Using the SIP in this way opened up several insights. It showed me how strategies evolved over time, with past decisions continuing to shape future options. It revealed how the personal biographies of labor leaders—their histories, experiences, and social ties—directly shaped the strategies they pursued. And it forced me to pay attention to the dilemmas and trade-offs that labor leaders constantly faced, where each choice could simultaneously create new opportunities and foreclose others.
The main contribution of this work is to move beyond purely structural explanations and highlight the strategic decisions of movement leaders. These choices, I argue, mattered profoundly. They actively shaped the trajectory, dynamics, and even the outcomes of these movements. In short, the story of Egypt’s labor movement pre-2011 cannot be understood without recognizing the weight of these decisions—and the leaders who made them.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
NA: This book speaks to key audiences. First, it offers an essential reference for academics—particularly sociologists and political scientists—working on authoritarianism, democratization, state-labor relations, and social movements. Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as those studying other regions, will find in it a valuable lens for understanding how Egypt’s old social pact unraveled in the years leading to Mubarak’s fall.
Second, it is well-suited for the classroom. As an assigned text in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in sociology and political science and MENA studies, it provides students with a vivid account of the social struggles that shaped the 2011 uprising.
Third, the book will attract policymakers interested in the dynamics preceding the Arab uprisings, as it sheds light on the roots of social unrest in Egypt and shows how these dynamics continue to shape the region’s political trajectory today.
The book offers general readers an accessible, story-driven account that brings Egypt’s protests to life, blending the struggles of ordinary workers with the broader drama of resilience, resistance, and hope. Clear and compelling, it speaks to scholars, policymakers, and general readers alike, revealing how ordinary struggles reshaped Egypt’s political landscape.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
NA: Today I am working on youth environmental activism in Egypt and COP27 from an interactive social movement perspective, as well as on local environmental activism in Egypt through the lens of affect and emotions.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 5 to 8)
Main argument
I argue that the leaders’ strategies, tactics, and actions—influenced by their different biographies, relation to politics, and the social base they enjoyed (or not) within the movement—had a significant influence on both movements’ internal and external dynamics in the context of the authoritarian regime of Mubarak (2006–10), and on the eve of its breakdown in 2011.
In the case of both movements, their leaders worked intensively on mobilizing their colleagues to demand their economic rights by exploiting their support networks—those they had largely constructed through the fraudulent trade unions elections of 2006. As mentioned, and as will be discussed more in detail in the first chapter, the changing strategy of the regime, which stopped resorting to the repression of labor protests, especially with the mid-2000s, presented a political opportunity that encouraged labor activism to thrive. In the case of the Mahalla movement, which enjoyed a long history of activism and strong mobilizing structures, the perception of political opportunities by the movement’s leaders was not necessary for them to decide to mobilize their colleagues. In fact, they weren’t able to detect such political opportunities before the movement’s mobilization. On the contrary, the leaders mobilized the movement members to ask for the two months’ worth of bonuses based on their belief that success would not be hard to achieve, given the movement’s long history of successful activism. In the case of the RETA movement, which didn’t enjoy such a history of activism or such strong organizational structures as the Mahalla movement, the leaders’ realization of the changing strategy of regime players was essential in motivating them to mobilize their colleagues to take advantage of political opportunities and, thus, to request equal salaries to their colleagues in Cairo. In both cases, the activism of these leaders and the success of their tactics led to the circumvention of security pressures and, consequently, the success of their early mobilizations. This encouraged them to go even further in their activism.
In both movements, the leaders had a great impact on the movement’s capacity to push the government to achieve its socioeconomic demands. In the case of the Mahalla labor movement, strong mobilizing structures were an important but insufficient condition for guaranteeing the movement’s capacity to survive and to succeed in challenging the players of the authoritarian regime of Mubarak. In contrast, the choices, strategies, and tactics deployed by the movement’s leaders were a necessary prerequisite for success. In the case of the RETA movement, the leader’s choices and decisions were not only crucial for its success in confronting the regime’s players, but also, and importantly, in building the movement’s weak or even non existent mobilizing structures in a restrictive political context.
Leaders’ agency in both movements included: exploiting arising political opportunities, putting forward effective strategies and resonant framings, allowing the persistence of the movement (in the case of the Mahalla labor movement), and achieving success in protests until the formation of a social movement on a national scale (in the case of the RETA movement). In this regard, leaders’ agency can only be understood through a dynamic and interactional perspective. Leaders’ actions and strategies do not just enable them to exploit opportunities and respond to the constraints imposed by the players of authoritarian regimes, but also allow them to generate new opportunities for the movement to expand and to consolidate its structures (as in the case of the RETA movement), or to persist and sustain itself for several days despite security pressures (as in the case of the Mahalla movement).
The decision of the Mahalla movement leaders to challenge the Mubarak regime, and to ask for a minimum wage for all workers, can be explained by the presence of a group of politicized leaders within the movement who were opposed to the regime. They considered the regime’s changing strategy and the movement’s previous successes as opportunities for increasing their activism and opposition to regime policies. In the same vein, the politicization of some of the RETA movement’s leaders, and their cognitive vision of sociopolitical change, encouraged these leaders to exploit the victory they had obtained, by forcing the government to meet their economic demands after ten days in front of the Cabinet. In this sense, the presence of politicized leaders at the top of a social movement, and their ability to achieve previous successes, are necessary conditions in opposing the players of an authoritarian regime. The Mahalla labor movement’s unsuccessful attempt to oppose/challenge the regime players can be explained by two factors: first, the presence of a group of leaders within the movement (similar to other labor movements that emerged in the Egyptian context since 2004), who advocated for a consensual position with the regime, and considered demands that were strictly financial to be their priority. Second, their possession of a social base within the movement that was broad enough to prevent its mobilization in a threatening manner to the regime. To avoid repression, the strategy of this nonpoliticized group of leaders, who also possessed a large social base within the movement, pushed it to cancel the call for the April 6, 2008, strike, thereby demobilizing the movement. The other group of more politicized leaders—whose social base was much weaker within the movement—failed to mobilize the movement to strike. However, their persistence in calling for the strike, a persistence that was amplified by the privately owned press, put the regime’s security apparatus on a state of alert. The latter resorted to a level of repression that the movement wasn’t equipped to deal with. In contrast, the RETA employee’s movement was able to challenge regime players and to successfully contest the regime’s corporatist system, as it was led by a group of politicized leaders who had a strong social base within the movement. They were able to exploit this to convince the movement’s members of the necessity of building a new trade union independent of the state corporatist structure, for the first time in Egypt’s history since 1957. To achieve their vision, the leaders capitalized on the construction of a strong collective identity for the movement over the ten days of the sit-in. They produced narratives and framings that enabled them to persuade the movement’s constituencies to embrace their choice, despite the risks. Through the narrative they formulated, the movement leaders managed to turn the threats or risks that the movement feared (e.g., risk of repression) into opportunities to be seized (e.g., remaining united to preserve their power). In the same vein, through the strategies they implemented, they succeeded in obliging the government to recognize their union and stopped any attempts by the regime players to block their oppositional initiative. In this sense, the presence of politicized leaders, who enjoyed a strong social base within the movement and were able to formulate effective strategies and resonant framings, was a necessary condition for it to succeed in its oppositional endeavor to the players of the authoritarian regime.