"In Egypt, second life for independent trade unions", 5 Feb 2016

We publish posthumously this article by Giulio Regeni, an il manifesto contributor who was based in Cairo while researching his doctoral thesis. On Wednesday, his tortured body was discovered in a ditch in the city. Because independent trade unions are a contentious topic in Egypt, Regeni asked us to publish this article under a pseudonym, as we have done in the past. Today, we publish this last dispatch under the author’s real name...

The Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS), a beacon of independent Egyptian trade unionism, has just held a vibrant meeting...On the agenda was a recommendation from Sisi’s ministers for close cooperation between the government and the country’s only official union, the Egyptian Trade Union Federation, with the explicit order to counter the role of independent trade unions and to further marginalize workers...[I]n recent days...board workers in the textile, cement and construction industries, went on strike for as long as they could. Mostly their demands concern the extension of wage rights and indemnities to public companies...These are benefits that workers have ceased to enjoy following the massive wave of privatizations during the last period of the Mubarak era...The unions’ defiance of the state of emergency and the regime’s appeals for stability and social order — justified by the “war on terrorism” — signifies, even if indirectly, a bold questioning of the underlying rhetoric the regime uses to justify its own existence and its repression of civil society.