Manufacturing stability: everyday politics of work in an industrial steel town in Helwan, Egypt

A few days before Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011, he reminded the Egyptian people that ’istiqrār (‘stability’) was his legacy both domestically and internationally. Their choice was between ‘stability’ and ‘chaos’, he threatened. This thesis argues that stability is a mode of governmentality whose power cannot be fully appreciated at the level of political discourse only. Rather, stability as a practice of government is entangled with peoples’ values, aspirations, and the intimate politics of everyday life. In Egypt between the Free Officers coup of 1952 and the January 25th revolution of 2011, ‘stability’ embodied access to both tenured employment and the means to reproduce the conditions of ‘a good life’ in the context of the family. Adequate understanding of stability and its ubiquity as an ideal must take into account the complex ways in which state projects and imaginative appropriation of those projects intersect. The thesis draws on fieldwork in an industrial neighbourhood of Cairo central to political movements of Egypt to analyse the everyday politics surrounding access to tenured employment in the context of the casualisation of labour and deregulation of capital since the inception of neo-liberal reforms in Egypt in 1991. By analysing the politics of labour at a site of strategic interest to the Egyptian regime from Abdul-Nasser to Mubarak, the thesis highlights how adequate understanding of political economy, practices of governing and neoliberalism must include both the shop floor and the home. The material for this study is drawn from twenty-two months of ethnographic research on the shop-floors and in the homes of the company town of Egypt’s oldest public-owned fully integrated steel plant, the Egyptian Iron and Steel Company (EISCO) in Helwan. I explore how the politics around tenured employment enabled the state to tighten its grip over what historically used to be a leading site of militant labour activism. I argue that the state capitalised on workers’ valuation of relationality and reproduction, represented in their aspiration for ’istiqrār (‘stability’), by confining new temporary fixed-term employment to children and relatives of EISCO permanent workers. In the face of the increased precariousness of work and life conditions under neo-liberalism, permanent work contracts, I propose, acted as a potential property right that transformed a group of militant workers into a privileged group and set their interests against the rest of the working class outside the plant. The thesis shows how the constant innovation in property relations and the re-appropriation of the meaning of work in people’s lives, by turning ‘stability’ from a social value into a productivist and calculative one, perpetuated the capitalist labour regime and values in workers’ communities

Labor Struggles and the Quest for Permanent Employment in Revolutionary Egypt

Egypt is a country of its people. What has been the effect on its inhabitants of the 2011 revolution and subsequent developments? In 2013, a conference held under the auspices of Cairo Papers in Social Science examined this issue from the points of view of anthropologists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, and urban planners. The papers collected here reveal the strategies that various actors employed in this situation.https://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/2165/thumbnail.jp

Precarious Revolution: Labor and neo-liberal securitisation in Egypt

The article draws on precarious workers’ engagement with the Egyptian revolution between 2011 and 2013. Despite their radical moves—reclaiming land previously appropriated by the state and staging various neighbourhood protests—the workers in this ethnography refused to associate with the revolution. Their curious position between radicality and dismissal of the revolution lays the groundwork to explore neoliberal securitisation. Although securitisation evolved globally alongside neoliberalism in order to facilitate accumulation by dispossession, the particular securitisation strategies used with disparate groups of workers, and their implication on the different ways workers make claims for a good life, still need further research. The article thus explores the class project of neoliberal securitisation. It argues that securitisation has generally been marginalised in studies of labour precarity, which have tended to point to the retrenchments of welfare benefits and insecurity under market conditions. By instead positing neoliberal securitisation as a class project, I show how the evolution of property relations is drawing new actors into the class struggle. The article thus re-centre class within the literature on labour precarity and the politics of security. Based on an ethnographic study in al-Tibbin, a town built around the largest and oldest steel factory in the south of Cairo, the article explores how the differential tactics used to securitise workers’ communities deeply impacted their repertoires of political action, becoming a catalyst for class struggle between various groups of workers. Securitisation thus co-constituted precarity by continuously drawing new subjects to the class struggle. Despite this, scholars and revolutionary actors have accorded more attention to the ‘spectacular’ resistance of organised workers in contrast to precarious workers’ ephemeral but influential engagements—a tendency that has been detrimental to the revolution’s trajectory