February 17, 2011

Workers Strike Along Suez Canal

By ANTHONY SHADID

CAIRO — Hundreds of workers went on strike Thursday along the Suez Canal, one of the world’s strategic waterways, joining others across Egypt pressing demands for better wages and conditions in protests that have sent the economy reeling and defied the military’s attempt to restore a veneer of the ordinary after President Hosni Mubarak’s fall last week.
The labor unrest at textile mills, pharmaceutical plants, chemical industries, the Cairo airport, transportation sector and banks has emerged as one of the most powerful dynamics in a country navigating the military-led transition that followed an 18-day popular uprising and the end of Mr. Mubarak’s three decades of rule.
Banks reopened last week, but amid a wave of protests over salaries and management abuses promptly shut again this week. The opening of schools was delayed another week, and a date has yet to be set for opening the stock market, which some fear may plummet over the economic reverberations and anxiety about the political transition.
The military has repeatedly urged workers to end their strikes, to no avail.
“For 30 years, there were no protests at all — well, not really — and now that’s all there is,” Ibrahim Aziz, a merchant in downtown Cairo, said. “The situation’s a mess.”
The military leadership has sought for days to navigate a country in the throes of a political transition that could remake Egypt more dramatically than at any time since the monarchy was overthrown in 1952. In a series of statements it has outlined steps to amend the constitution and return Egypt to civilian rule within six months, though the exact date for elections for the presidency and Parliament was left ambiguous.
So far the military seems to enjoy broad popular support, not least for facilitating the departure of Mr. Mubarak to his residence in the Sinai town of Sharm el-Sheikh, though some have complained of decision-making that remains utterly opaque to the public. Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and critic of Mr. Mubarak, complained this week about that lack of transparency and the speed of the military-led transition.
Other critics have questioned why the military has refused to free thousands of political prisoners and lift emergency rule, which gave the Mubarak government wide powers in arresting and imprisoning people it deemed its opponents. Thursday marked the second day without the military’s issuing any communiqués on its intentions in the weeks ahead, and questions about forming political parties and civil rights are left unanswered.
“There has not been very much coming out about what I call the infrastructure — even the temporary infrastructure — for democracy,” a Western diplomat in Cairo said Thursday. “That seems to me an area where further clarification would be important.”
The diplomat said Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi has emerged as the clear leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, to which Mr. Mubarak delegated power when he resigned Friday. “Tantawi seems to be the acting president of Egypt,” the diplomat said. Though the council has maintained contacts with the United States, through the Defense Department and the National Security Council, it has so proven disciplined in keeping its deliberations from diplomats and opposition leaders.
“What one would have liked to see is more transparency in this whole Supreme Council deliberation process,” the diplomat said under customary rules of anonymity.
Egypt’s revolution was, in some ways, remarkable for the consensus over its demands, primarily the end to Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarian rule, with disparate ideologies subsumed in the narrative of a popular uprising. But already this week some of the fundamental rules that have underlined republican Egypt were being renegotiated.
The head of Al-Azhar, once one of the world’s foremost institutions of religious scholarship, has called for its leadership to be elected, not appointed by the government, a change that could reverse decades of the institution’s abject subordination to the state. The strikes may prove no less decisive in turning back years of privatization that left workers’ with fewer protections and more grievances.
In a statement Thursday striking workers in Mahalla el-Kobra, the center of the country’s textile industry and a stronghold of labor resistance in the Nile Delta, said they would no longer take part in a government-controlled labor union but rather join the new Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Union, which it said was set up on Jan. 30.
The striking workers at the Suez Canal Authority said their protests in the three major canal cities — Suez, Port Said and Ismailiya — would not interfere with the operations of the canal, which links the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. One of the world’s busiest waterways, the canal is one of Egypt’s primary sources of revenue and a major transit route for global shipping and oil.
Other strikes were reported at textile plants in the coastal city of Damietta and a pharmaceutical factory in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city. Taken together they are thought to number in the tens of thousands of workers in one of Egypt’s most pronounced episodes of labor unrest. The problems point to a growing challenge for both the military and caretaker government: How to satisfy demands as the economy staggers.
“Everyone’s looking for money and there’s none to be had,” Hani Shukrallah, a political analyst and editor, said.

David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim contributed reporting.