During the 2011 uprising, Egypt's labor movement played a significant role in bringing down the authoritarian regime. Formerly renowned for being an important driver of change, the movement has ever since been increasingly marginalized politically, failing to achieve either significant labor-specific gains and/or broader objectives related to the overall process of political transformation. How did this come about?
In PRIF Working Paper No. 31 “From Driver of Change to Marginalized Actor: Egypt’s New Unionism from a comparative perspective”, Nadine Abdalla (Arab Forum for Alternative Studies (AFA), Egypt) and Jonas Wolff analyze this shift of the Egyptian labor movement since 2011. It does so by investigating Egypt’s movement of independent trade unions, the most dynamic element within the country’s labor movement, from a comparative perspective. Specifically, the paper uses the experience of Brazil’s New Unionism in the 1980s as a contrasting case, identifies the factors that have enabled and constrained what is arguably the most successful example of a New Unionist movement in the Global South, and applies this explanatory framework in an in-depth study on the trajectory of Egypt’s New Unionism since 2011.
This Working Paper was written within the context of the research project “Socioeconomic Protests and Political Transformation: Dynamics of Contentious Politics in Egypt and Tunisia Against the Background of South American Experiences”. Nadine Abdalla and the Arab Forum for Alternative Studies are partners of this project.
This PRIF Working Paper is available as a free download.
Further recommended reading:
Blogpost by Irene Weipert-Fenner and Jonas Wolff on conceptualizing institutional responses to social challenges: Repertoires of Counter-Contention: Conceptualizing Institutional Responses to Social Movements, published on 26th October 2016 on Bretterblog.