Main Street

Midwestern Jobs, Egyptian Workers

This is my second post on my recent trip to Egypt with the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center. For more background, take a look at the first post.

Over the last few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to thousands of workers in Ohio about the need for decent jobs. One of the topics that I’ve discussed over and over is the need for good trade deals that are designed to protect the rights of working people, helping to create decent jobs that sustain families and communities. Overwhelmingly, people understand that bad trade policy has played a role in the decline of Midwestern manufacturing. So if you’re feeling lonely, keep this in mind: you can make a lot of friends almost anywhere in Ohio by knocking on the doors of strangers and talking about jobs and trade.

I’m from Canton, located in the industrial heart of Northeast Ohio, and the issue is intensely personal for me. I’ve seen too many cities gutted by the decline in manufacturing, and talked to too many people who watched their neighborhoods collapse as work disappeared. It is easy to get fatalistic in this situation, to think that things had to be this way. But it didn’t have to happen this way, and it doesn’t have to stay this way. Countless heavily-unionized countries have maintained their manufacturing communities through smart policies. In contrast, over the last few decades, our political leaders have allowed our industrial heartland to crumble.

Because of my personal experience, I was particularly moved by the stories and requests of the workers in Mahalla-el Kubra, a manufacturing city in Egypt where working people have repeatedly stood up and demanded their rights. Even though the official trade union movement in Egypt opposes their efforts, the workers in Mahalla-el Kubra have organized and mobilized effectively at the grassroots for years. Thanks to their efforts, they play a leading role in the labor movement in Egypt, and deserve to be an inspiration to working families around the world. They have won their share of victories and faced their share of setbacks, but I came away from my meeting with them with a profound feeling of confidence in the workers there. If they continue to organize and stand together, it seems very likely that they will earn the recognition of their rights and improve the quality of life for themselves, and their children.

Crammed into a small room with about a hundred workers, we heard over a dozen powerful stories from the workers in Mahalla-el Kubra. Some are dealing with unsafe work conditions, and the real fear that if they were injured at work they would be cast aside by their employer. Some are forced to sign a letter of resignation on the first day of their job, so that an employer can fire them without cause at any time. Like here, some have been fired for organizing and demanding their rights. Almost all of them are struggling with wages that barely allow them to stay above water. Many earn just a few dollars a day. Some earn even less. And foreign guest workers are brought in to undercut even these meager wages, setting them against other workers who are even more harshly exploited. Apparently, a worker earning $3 a day is simply too greedy.

One of the workers, after discussing an employer that had left the country to avoid compensating its workers, asked if it would be possible to have an American-Egyptian trade agreement similar to the one we have with Jordan. You are probably as surprised as I was to learn that the U.S. has a relatively good trade agreement with Jordan, but we do. Although there are still clear problems in Jordan, the agreement includes at least some protections for workers. And unlike a lot of our recent trade agreements, the agreement with Jordan was passed with strong bipartisan support in 2000, largely because it did contain these sorts of protections for workers. The agreement has clearly made enough of an impact that workers in Egypt are aware of the benefits, and want stronger trade agreements for themselves as well. When I heard this demand, I remembered a lot of the conversations I’ve had with workers in Ohio about this exact issue. I saw a hint of what the world can look like if working families on opposite sides of the planet recognize and fight for their rights and dignity together. Something that had seemed abstract, that good trade agreements can help working people here and in other countries, suddenly became very real.

Good trade agreements can and should be one of the basic demands that working families everywhere make of their political leaders. They are one of the tools that can prevent a brutal “race to the bottom”, in which employers search the world for the most vulnerable and exploitable workers; that’s a world where working families lose, and where a worker earning $3 a day is just too greedy. Such agreements are very rare and difficult to achieve; in the U.S. as in Egypt, business interests push hard against them. But they can be won when we organize for them, and they can help us win even more victories by helping all of us secure the basic rights that we need. The demand for good, fair trade agreements is one of the many things that working families in the U.S. and Egypt have in common.

Tags: Egypt, trade policy