Egypt: Government accused of interfering in labour union elections

The Egyptian government has been accused of interfering in labour union elections taking place this month by excluding leaders of independent labour organisations from the electoral race.

Several activists, including the president of the independent Egyptian Democratic Labour Congress, Saad Shaaban, have complained about pressure being placed on the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration to exclude independent trade union leaders from the electoral race.

Egyptian officials have attributed these exclusions to the candidates’ failure to prepare the required papers. Egyptian Minister of Manpower and Immigration, Mohamed Saffan, told a news conference last week that workers are taking part in historic elections that allow them to freely choose their representatives for the first time in 12 years. He added that “our goal is to produce a trade union organisation that expresses workers with the utmost transparency.”

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One of the candidates who was excluded from the race, president of the independent tourism trade union, Hamdi Ezz, told Al Monitor that “some powerful labour leaders have been excluded to make room for other pro-government official unions and tend to business owners at the expense of workers.”

Ezz explained that the elections supervisory committee did not provide any valid reasons for his removal from the race, adding that the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration took an “intransigent” attitude towards the candidates and did not announce the final list of candidates by the legal deadline.

Kamal Abbas, coordinator of the Centre for Trade Union and Workers Services and a member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights, also criticised the short timeframe of the electoral process, arguing that contenders did not have enough time to campaign. Abbas believes “the aim of rushing in[to] holding the elections is to give the government the chance to go to the conference of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) due in Geneva in June with a new trade union grouping in Egypt, thus helping remove its name from the short-term list of the countries that violate workers’ rights,” according to Gulf News.

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In 2017 the ILO, a UN agency that deals with international labour standards, placed Egypt on its blacklist citing violations by the government of workers’ rights, including the arrest of labour protesters and curbs on independent trade unions. In April 2017, Amnesty International reported that “the Egyptian authorities have waged a punitive campaign against workers and trade unionists to deter and punish them from mobilising or going on strike.” Amnesty added that “dozens of workers and trade unionists in Egypt have faced arrest, detention, dismissal from work or trials in military courts.”

This is the first time labour union elections have been held for 12 years. The last elections were held under ousted President Hosni Mubarak in 2006, before being suspended due to the political unrest that followed the uprising of 2011. The elections are taking place in three phases, the first of which began on 23 May to elect the enterprise union committees, each of which will represent enterprises, factories and companies in one governorate or city. The second phase, the trade union councils’ elections, will take place on 7 June and the final phase, the general trade union elections, on 13 June.