海角大神

Issandr El Amrani, the main writer behind The Arabist, has been posting occasional links and thoughts on the Brotherhoodization of Egyptian institutions, real and imagined, since the election of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi as president.聽

A few days ago he pointed to the failure of Egypt's new constitution to devolve powers from Egypt's traditionally strong central state to the provinces and the power that gives to President Morsi and his appointees to control politics at the local level. In Egypt's recent cabinet reshuffle what caught his eye in particular was the appointment of Brotherhood stalwart Mohamed Beshir as minister of local development, since he was given an expanded role in selecting governors, who are appointed, not elected, in Egypt. An article in Al-Masry Al-Youm ("Egypt Today") says Beshir's ministry is currently planning on changing eight Egyptian governors, with the new officials coming from the ranks of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and Salafi Al Nour Party.聽

Today he flags a new piece by Joel Beinin, a historian of Egyptian labor and industrialization at Stanford University, which reinforces the sense that Morsi and the leaders of the Brotherhood are seeking to adapt the institutions and methods of Mubarak's Egypt to their own rule, rather than fundamentally change the top-down way the country has almost always been governed.

Beinin writes that on Nov. 25, Morsi issued a presidential decree on labor unions that received scant attention in the press, coming as it did on the heels of a decree that issued him broad powers designed to help him rush through Egypt's new constitution. That earlier decree sparked clashes and a political stand-off that ended in a Brotherhood victory when the constitution was passed. But Decree 97 of 2012 could have far reaching implications for how Egypt is governed going forward.

The decree governs how the leaders of Egypt's state-controlled Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (ETUF) will be chosen, and could lead to Brotherhood packing the government-sponsored sub-unions with their own men.

"The decree also authorizes Minister of Manpower and Migration Khalid al-Azhari of the Muslim Brotherhood鈥檚 Freedom and Justice Party to appoint replacements to vacant trade union offices if no second-place candidate exists. State security officials banned thousands of opposition trade unionists from running in 2006, so hundreds of candidates ran unopposed. Thus, as many as 150 Muslim Brothers could be appointed to posts in ETUF鈥檚 24 national sector unions, while 14 of 24 executive board members will be sacked," Beinin writes.

He continues:聽

That last sentence is worth emphasizing, since it's a point often missed about the Brothers in the West. The movement's economic ideology is largely free market capitalist, and strong independent trade unionism as about the furthest thing from the minds of the movement's leaders.

Beinin points out there were 3,150 strikes and other workers actions in the first eight months of last year, and with Egypt currently negotiating an austerity program in exchange for a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, the chance for more unemployment and labor unrest is high.

In hindsight, an unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes across Egypt that started in the middle of the last decade helped set the stage for the uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2011. While it looks clear that the new government, just like the old one, will seek to push labor organization into easily controlled government proxies, stuffing the genie back into the bottle may prove difficult.

In 2007, I quoted American University in Cairo Political Science Professor Mohammed Kamel al-Sayyid in a piece on the then-blossoming strike wave, which was being fueled by IMF-urged policies that had sped up economic growth, but left wages stagnant and unemployment high.

Those risks, clearly, remain today. And now it is Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood's problem.