Reply #29: Trade unions: the revolutionary social network at play in Egypt and Tunisia [View All]

[Catherina]

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Trade unions: the revolutionary social network at play in #Egypt and Tunisia | Eric Lee and Benjamin Weinthal | Eric... http://bit.ly/dFwXQU
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Trade unions: the revolutionary social network at play in Egypt and Tunisia
The media have focused on Facebook and Twitter, but the pro-democracy movements have flourished thanks to unions

Eric Lee and Benjamin Weinthal
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 February 2011 12.57 GMT



Egyptian textile workers demonstrating over high prices and low wages in 2008, in the northern town of Mehalla. Photograph: Stringer/EPA

Perhaps the most overlooked factor in the demise of the authoritarian Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, and the weakening of Hosni Mubarak's grip on state power in Egypt, has been the trade unions in both countries.

While the media has reported on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook as revolutionary methods of mobilisation, it was the old-fashioned working class that enabled the pro-democracy movements to flourish.

As working men and women in Egypt became increasingly vulnerable to exploitation and a deteriorating quality of life, the only legal trade unions – the ones affiliated to the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) – proved worthless. The result of all of this was an unprecedented wave of strikes across the public and private sectors that began in 2004 and has continued to the present day. During the first four years of the current strike wave, more than 1,900 strikes took place and an estimated 1.7 million workers were involved.

As one worker in a fertiliser company put it, the effect of going on strike was to convince the employer "that they had a company with human beings working in it. In the past, they dealt with us as if we were not human."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/10/trade-unions-egypt-tunisia

"they dealt with us as if we were not human." Workers of the world waking up all over.