ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the role played by workers’ collective action and self-organisation in independent trade unions in four popular uprisings, Tunisia (beginning December 2010), Egypt (beginning January 2011), Sudan (beginning December 2018) and Algeria (beginning February 2019). It will argue firstly that strike action was the means by which workers seized and put into practice fundamental political rights, including rights to assembly, to freedom of speech and to organise themselves independently of the state.
It will examine how the developing workers’ movements interacted with opposition movements calling for political reforms, including the extension of democratic rights and an end to corruption. Workers’ collective action played a decisive role at the height of popular mobilisations against the regimes discussed here. In Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria, mass strikes took place precisely at significant moments of rupture within the regime (such as the removal of the head of state by other figures in the political elite), or in the case of Sudan triggered a repressive backlash which led to a further deepening of the popular movement. Workers’ actions as workers, and not simply as citizens, may thus offer the best hope of overcoming the military-bureaucratic core of the authoritarian regimes
