Protests continue in Egypt, defying the authorities who vow to clamp down fiercely on any signs of protest. Protests continued yesterday, 26 January, despite the continued block on Twitter and what appears to be an intermittent block on Facebook and a steeped up presence of security forces throughout Cairo, Suez and other parts of the country. A third protestor reportedly died in Suez and angry protestors gathered at the morgue demanding his body, as they claimed that the protestor had been shot by police.
Clearer evidence of police abuses beginning on the 25th have surfaced. The Guardian reporter in Cairo was present in downtown Cairo in the late night of the 25th when protestors set fire to a police vehicle – or perhaps it is more accurate to state that the vehicle became inflamed, as the reporter has not stated that he saw protestors actually lighting it. Plain clothed security forces surrounded him and the others, beat them and hauled them into a police vehicle. They were detained for hours, and driven to a security forces headquarters in the desert. They were abused and cursed at, one protestor fell into a coma in the security van. For a live audio of the event, click here.
Apparently, this is a common response from the police in the face of protestors. They are beaten and then sent to the desert, sometimes robbed of all of their possessions and left there. There were unconfirmed reports of other similar incidents during the later part of the day, on the 25th.
The government itself is confirming that 860 people have been ‘rounded up’ by police, with at least a couple of hundred being released as of last night (on the 26th). So detentions have been much more widespread than what I reported in the entry yesterday.
Protestors are vowing not to stop, while the regime is vowing to clamp down on all dissent. They are now calling for an even larger day of demonstrations on Friday, following Friday’s prayer.
Now that it is clear that protests will not let up Western governments are beginning to change their tone. From the normal, “We hope that both parties will show restraint,” to “We urge the Egyptian government to allow the Egyptian people to express their will fully.” The US government, who confirmed its faith that the Egyptian government is stable on the afternoon of the 25th and that Mubarak remains a close ally in the region the following day, later that same day (on Wednesday) made an ‘about face’ and began calling on the Mubarak regime to quickly implement reforms.
We cheer on Egyptian protestors throughout the country and we hope that Friday brings a million to continue the momentum that Tunisians have generated!
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Almasryeen! Almasryeen!
Yesterday, the 25th of January, stretching into the early morning was inspiring. Yes, Egyptians you have been inspired and you inspire. “The day of anger” became a day of love and hope and aspiration. A day of possibilities.
I followed the events all day, from the morning when the protests/marches began until the evening when demonstrations continued throughout Egypt, in Alexandria, Cairo, Mahalla, Mansoura. I followed on Facebook (“We are all Khaled Said”) and Twitter (3arabawy), as well as the Guardian and CNN for live updates.
In the morning marches the word was out that the Mubarak regime gave the unprecedented ‘go ahead’ to protestors, in the case of a restrain from vandalism. And marches spread and spread throughout Cairo – in Ramses, Nile Cornish, Bulaq, Mohandiseen, Dokki, Shobra, Dar El Salam. At one point thousands and thousands (an unconfirmed report of 20,000!) converged on Gamat Dowal Alarabiya Street in Mohandiseen. And more marchers converged, to convene at Tahrir, in front of the Parliament.
Outside of Cairo protests started early on in Assuit and Sinai. Then, later demonstrations exploded in Mahalla, Suez, Alexandria.
By mid-afternoon, when the police were “overwhelmed” by the numbers, minute by minute reports began to come out of ‘clashes’… The police began to use tear gas, rubber bullets. Protestors were trying to break down the police cordons and clashes ensued. Reports are that both police and protestors were throwing rocks. The police began to beat protestors, arrest them (it seems at least some of the arrests were selective, targeting public opposition figures and known activists).
And then the phone lines began to be cut. Twitter was down. Facebook stayed open all day and night, but I could no longer follow Twitter and I could not reach my friends by phone in Mounira/Dokki/AlMarg. The large group of protestors who convened at Tahrir by late afternoon confirmed that most phone lines were cut. TEData had cut Twitter – and until now there is no access.
Protestors began to tear down posters of Hosni Mubarak (in Mahalla and Alexandria) and advertisements for the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP)(in Cairo, near to the Parliament). Throughout the day people were sending in/posting videos caught by their mobiles of protestors chanting “Ra7l” like the protestors in Tunisia. “Out, Mubarak!” “Mesh 3ayzeen’ak (We don’t want you)!” As the international media began to get on the scene more of people’s voices were broadcast. The activist/blogger-reporters and the protestors alike were surprised by the showing. They were surprised that so many Egyptians came out to participate – young and middle aged and old, unemployed and employed, professional and working class.
A large group convened at Tahrir, vowing to take over the Parliament and then to stage a sit-in overnight. The reports that I read this morning (and video clips that I watched) were that in the early morning hours the police waged a massive clampdown with tear gas, in an effort to disperse the protestors. At this point it appears that Tahrir has been cleared, at least for the time being. And three people total are reported dead – two protestors and one police officer.
The day of demonstrations – the “day of the beginning of the revolution” – seems to be very well organized, largely through the social networking sites (Twitter and Facebook) a couple of weeks prior. It was non-violent on the part of protestors, and especially in the morning marches I saw families present – men and women with their children. And really throughout the day I read of people coming to the demonstrations with their parents, their children. It was not a day for and by “the young people” as Al Baradei claimed on CNN, but a day for and by THE PEOPLE. And there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this protest was orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as the Mubarak Administration has claimed. The Brotherhood has even stated publicly that they would not actively participate.
And the organizers chose the 25th – Police Day – in a symbolic gesture: Will the police be on the side of Egyptians at this point in history as they were in 1951, when they defended Egyptians against the British?!
Like the protests in Tunisia, most pictures show middle age men – raising their voices, raising their fists, walking side by side, running through the streets. I felt such joy for these men, to be expressing their anger and frustrations in union, to take over public spaces that are so tightly controlled (even for just a bit), to run ‘freely’. It must have been an unforgettable day for them, a day of elation. Not just for these men, of course, but for all those who took part.
And all of us who support their demands we support that the protests continue. On and on and on until demands are met! We will do what we must do to support the aspirations and rights of Egyptians! Tell us how…
I followed the events all day, from the morning when the protests/marches began until the evening when demonstrations continued throughout Egypt, in Alexandria, Cairo, Mahalla, Mansoura. I followed on Facebook (“We are all Khaled Said”) and Twitter (3arabawy), as well as the Guardian and CNN for live updates.
In the morning marches the word was out that the Mubarak regime gave the unprecedented ‘go ahead’ to protestors, in the case of a restrain from vandalism. And marches spread and spread throughout Cairo – in Ramses, Nile Cornish, Bulaq, Mohandiseen, Dokki, Shobra, Dar El Salam. At one point thousands and thousands (an unconfirmed report of 20,000!) converged on Gamat Dowal Alarabiya Street in Mohandiseen. And more marchers converged, to convene at Tahrir, in front of the Parliament.
Outside of Cairo protests started early on in Assuit and Sinai. Then, later demonstrations exploded in Mahalla, Suez, Alexandria.
By mid-afternoon, when the police were “overwhelmed” by the numbers, minute by minute reports began to come out of ‘clashes’… The police began to use tear gas, rubber bullets. Protestors were trying to break down the police cordons and clashes ensued. Reports are that both police and protestors were throwing rocks. The police began to beat protestors, arrest them (it seems at least some of the arrests were selective, targeting public opposition figures and known activists).
And then the phone lines began to be cut. Twitter was down. Facebook stayed open all day and night, but I could no longer follow Twitter and I could not reach my friends by phone in Mounira/Dokki/AlMarg. The large group of protestors who convened at Tahrir by late afternoon confirmed that most phone lines were cut. TEData had cut Twitter – and until now there is no access.
Protestors began to tear down posters of Hosni Mubarak (in Mahalla and Alexandria) and advertisements for the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP)(in Cairo, near to the Parliament). Throughout the day people were sending in/posting videos caught by their mobiles of protestors chanting “Ra7l” like the protestors in Tunisia. “Out, Mubarak!” “Mesh 3ayzeen’ak (We don’t want you)!” As the international media began to get on the scene more of people’s voices were broadcast. The activist/blogger-reporters and the protestors alike were surprised by the showing. They were surprised that so many Egyptians came out to participate – young and middle aged and old, unemployed and employed, professional and working class.
A large group convened at Tahrir, vowing to take over the Parliament and then to stage a sit-in overnight. The reports that I read this morning (and video clips that I watched) were that in the early morning hours the police waged a massive clampdown with tear gas, in an effort to disperse the protestors. At this point it appears that Tahrir has been cleared, at least for the time being. And three people total are reported dead – two protestors and one police officer.
The day of demonstrations – the “day of the beginning of the revolution” – seems to be very well organized, largely through the social networking sites (Twitter and Facebook) a couple of weeks prior. It was non-violent on the part of protestors, and especially in the morning marches I saw families present – men and women with their children. And really throughout the day I read of people coming to the demonstrations with their parents, their children. It was not a day for and by “the young people” as Al Baradei claimed on CNN, but a day for and by THE PEOPLE. And there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this protest was orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as the Mubarak Administration has claimed. The Brotherhood has even stated publicly that they would not actively participate.
And the organizers chose the 25th – Police Day – in a symbolic gesture: Will the police be on the side of Egyptians at this point in history as they were in 1951, when they defended Egyptians against the British?!
Like the protests in Tunisia, most pictures show middle age men – raising their voices, raising their fists, walking side by side, running through the streets. I felt such joy for these men, to be expressing their anger and frustrations in union, to take over public spaces that are so tightly controlled (even for just a bit), to run ‘freely’. It must have been an unforgettable day for them, a day of elation. Not just for these men, of course, but for all those who took part.
And all of us who support their demands we support that the protests continue. On and on and on until demands are met! We will do what we must do to support the aspirations and rights of Egyptians! Tell us how…
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Tunisians – You are for the world and with the world
There is a Hebrew proverb: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” I would add that in this era – of neoliberalism – of spiraling inequality, deteriorating and denying democratic orders, a global elite class ‘gone mad’, corporate reign – we may say that “Whoever revolts saves the world entire.”
Tunisians, for those who have risked your security and lives, you are acting for the world and with the world. You are an inspiration not just to the Arab world but to all of us who seek popular and just control over our political and social world.
As you are continuing to do, push on to end the dictatorship, to heal from the long and deep wounds of the dictatorial regime. Push on and on, keep making your demands heard, don’t let the revolution end here. And we, those of us ‘onlookers’, we will press the international community to support the popularly-demanded changes that the revolution calls for – not superficial measures like changing heads of seats that those ‘who fear’ desire.
And I urge Tunisians, not to separate the ‘political’ from the ‘economic’. This is a revolution not just about the human rights abuses and corruption of the Ben Ali regime; this is a revolution against a neoliberal order that is propping up these vary abuses – and is siphoning workers to the informal, deadening labor rights in all economic spheres, collapsing the productive capacities of countries to mere ‘extractive’ and export driven industries. This is about standing up against economic policies that the regime has backed with pressure and ‘support’ from the West.
Don’t make the same mistakes as the South Africans, the new leaders of the post-apartheid era who had spent a life time fighting against apartheid let their economic agenda fall away as they focused on a political agenda of fair elections, equal suffrage, full human rights. With ‘guidance’ from the international community, the leaders of the early post-apartheid era left in place constitutional provisions that made a redistributive program nearly impossible legally. Quickly the new South African government got pushed into an agenda of structural adjustments, and the decades and decades of an anti-apartheid struggle for redistributive justice became a lost dream.
The fact that three commissions have been formed in the Tunisia revolutionary transition and that all three are devoted to political and constitutional reforms (human rights, corruption, etc.) – is disconcerting. If the Tunisian government and people ‘in the making’ do not draw the connections between political and constitutional reforms and economic reforms, then indeed Western backing and meddling will continue as will deep disillusion.
In his Counterpunch article, Esam El-Amin only got it partially right: “The West’s Little Dictator” fully supported their Tunisian ally Ben Ali because he abided by their War on Terror and pro-Israel agenda, and more importantly, the Ben Ali regime complied with a neoliberal agenda of free trade, privatization, and liberalization that has directly benefited the Mafia regime. And as long as the new governing powers do not threaten this agenda, then the West will continue to back it and manipulate national policy in favor of it. Our common struggles must lie here, recognizing the intimate dance between economic, political and constitutional orders.
Tunisians, for those who have risked your security and lives, you are acting for the world and with the world. You are an inspiration not just to the Arab world but to all of us who seek popular and just control over our political and social world.
As you are continuing to do, push on to end the dictatorship, to heal from the long and deep wounds of the dictatorial regime. Push on and on, keep making your demands heard, don’t let the revolution end here. And we, those of us ‘onlookers’, we will press the international community to support the popularly-demanded changes that the revolution calls for – not superficial measures like changing heads of seats that those ‘who fear’ desire.
And I urge Tunisians, not to separate the ‘political’ from the ‘economic’. This is a revolution not just about the human rights abuses and corruption of the Ben Ali regime; this is a revolution against a neoliberal order that is propping up these vary abuses – and is siphoning workers to the informal, deadening labor rights in all economic spheres, collapsing the productive capacities of countries to mere ‘extractive’ and export driven industries. This is about standing up against economic policies that the regime has backed with pressure and ‘support’ from the West.
Don’t make the same mistakes as the South Africans, the new leaders of the post-apartheid era who had spent a life time fighting against apartheid let their economic agenda fall away as they focused on a political agenda of fair elections, equal suffrage, full human rights. With ‘guidance’ from the international community, the leaders of the early post-apartheid era left in place constitutional provisions that made a redistributive program nearly impossible legally. Quickly the new South African government got pushed into an agenda of structural adjustments, and the decades and decades of an anti-apartheid struggle for redistributive justice became a lost dream.
The fact that three commissions have been formed in the Tunisia revolutionary transition and that all three are devoted to political and constitutional reforms (human rights, corruption, etc.) – is disconcerting. If the Tunisian government and people ‘in the making’ do not draw the connections between political and constitutional reforms and economic reforms, then indeed Western backing and meddling will continue as will deep disillusion.
In his Counterpunch article, Esam El-Amin only got it partially right: “The West’s Little Dictator” fully supported their Tunisian ally Ben Ali because he abided by their War on Terror and pro-Israel agenda, and more importantly, the Ben Ali regime complied with a neoliberal agenda of free trade, privatization, and liberalization that has directly benefited the Mafia regime. And as long as the new governing powers do not threaten this agenda, then the West will continue to back it and manipulate national policy in favor of it. Our common struggles must lie here, recognizing the intimate dance between economic, political and constitutional orders.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
A longer hiatus than expected...back to blogging!
As one of the largest of the world’s multinationals, Vodafone gets plenty of attention from cheerleaders and critics alike – but not in the way that it should.
If we are reading the Financial Times, we will perhaps get a sense of how big and powerful Vodafone is in the business world. Vodafone has been forming partner network agreements with and buying majority holdings in national-based telecommunications operators throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Vodafone is spreading its wings with the breathtaking span of the globe, becoming the world’s largest mobile phone group with sales of more than US $ 58 billion and a market value of more than US $ 112 billion.
And with the news comes plenty of criticism. Customers in the UK, for example, expressed their grievances over Vodafone’s mobile call cost increase without any prior notification. We know about shareholders’ disgust at a few dozen people becoming extraordinarily wealthy from Vodafone’s acquisition of Mannesmann. We even hear criticism from bankers and investors, who, in 2005, accused Vodafone of being overly aggressive in the bond markets by issuing a US $ 880 million bond.
The veneer of its imperturbability begins to peel away, revealing cracks at the seams.
However, little is made public of the internal workings of Vodafone, except perhaps for board-CEO clashes, and yet, much is revealed from the inside, not only of Vodafone but of our times.
In Egypt the word on the street – among mini-bus drivers, recent college graduates and middle class professionals alike – is that Vodafone is one of the best companies to work for. The salaries are among the highest, the benefits among the most comprehensive, promotions and perks common.
Beyond this exclusive club of formal employment, however, lies a pool of subcontracted workers. Subcontractors with Vodafone hire workers with no contracts or benefits. In fact, being a non-Vodafone employee of Vodafone may be described as driving through a hurricane with a quick entrance and an exit that does not come quickly enough.
To illustrate, this year half of one cohort of Vodafone call center agents, hired by subcontracted employment agencies, left the job within the first three months – and about half of these employees left during or at the completion of the first month of training.
Non-married students and foreigners with varying levels of competent English language skills are attracted to Vodafone’s call center agent positions because the wage is nearly two times the competitive wage of entry-level professional positions in private firms in Cairo. It is slightly above the competitive rate of call center wages (excluding commissions).
Why then such high turnover? There are three ways to frame the answer: First, these unofficial employees are without a contract and ‘sign up’ for the job by signing away their rights and non-work life. Vodafone has expectations and requirements of its call center agents, and yet, does not make most of these known or clear. At the same time, Vodafone holds its agents responsible for what remains unspoken. For example, if an agent is absent from work two days in a row (without prior authorization), three days of pay is taken from the agent’s pay check. Without a contract, agents often only ‘discover’ this when they are confronted with the fact that they did not get paid for a day that they worked.
It is an infuriating double standard: The employer is not held accountable for anything, and at the same time, holds the employees responsible.
Second, the ‘your time is our time’ principle holds: The employee’s own time is at the whim of the employer. Call center agents are expected to stay until their supervisors tell them that they are finished for the day, even if that requires them to stay past their shift. The schedule regularly changes and the next week’s schedule remains unknown until the day/night of the next shift, making advanced non-work scheduling impossible. Agents are expected to arrive to the Vodafone premises 30 minutes before the ‘official’(i.e. paid) start of their shift, and they are expected to upload all applications within 15 minutes of the start. All of this is the employees’ time, taken for free by Vodafone.
Employees who rely on Vodafone transportation often arrive an hour before the start of the shift, spending three and a half to four hours total en route to and from Vodafone premises. Streamlining transportation costs, Vodafone pick-ups and drop-offs are at unreasonable times, such as a pick-up two hours before a shift at 4 in the morning! In the end employees spend nearly all of their waking hours during the work week either at work or going to and from work.
Third, the great contradiction of the post-Fordist era – the contradictory pull between ‘efficiency’ and ‘quality’ – is also borne squarely on the shoulders of the call center agents and their supervisors applying the pressure. This pressure to meet efficiency targets comes at the expense of quality customer service.
The streamlining of personnel costs, plus the general push to the bottom in terms of quality in the design to production to distribution stages, translates into a near constant furry of customer calls coupled with the constant pressure to get rid of the customers as quickly as possible.
In a degraded work environment, such as that in Egypt, this type of humiliating work becomes not only permissible but desirable. As Egypt’s General Authority for Investment proudly claims, Egypt’s wages are “among the most competitive in the region.” Or in other words, labour conditions are among the worst in the region.
But it is not as if workers in Egypt are just swallowing it. For the last five years there has been unprecedented protest among Egyptian workers – from factory workers to professionals – for public sector layoffs and low wages. And of course less dramatic than collective protest is saying high and dry ‘good bye’. The call center agent job may be attractive but for many its attraction wears quickly. The agents leave and Vodafone loses. There is no stability for workers but there is also no loyalty for employers, who then face hiring and training an incoming cohort.
Struggles are and should be waged for agreed-upon work conditions, with full employment rights and dignity of the person. However, we must not stop at the door of multinationals.
After all, Vodafone reflects and informs trends in the corporate world – of a two-tiered labor force (those with contracts and those without), of a revolving door (promises turned into grievances), of low costs and low quality. Low in-country investment and contributions to anything that may be called “development.”
This trend is not exclusive to the corporate world. Vodafone Egypt is part and parcel of the larger world of work, in Egypt and beyond. The work at Vodafone’s call centres is characteristic of work in the private and public sectors, in a neo-liberal era of stripped labour rights, steep hierarchy and weak stability.
Vodafone Egypt provides its call centre agents not a training befit of the latest approaches to work-based learning, but rather a run of the mill training en par with a 9th grade classroom in any private school in Egypt – a learning environment of control, that strips students of their sense of self and capabilities – an environment entirely befitting of work in Egypt.
It is exactly the privatization and liberalization policies that have propped up such an environment to which our attention and struggles must extend. More than two decades of such policies have created a regulatory framework that has only reinforced a culture of hierarchy and control, leaving workers of all stripes with few protections and rights. Deregulation of the private sector has ended up attracting multinationals like Vodafone to Egypt and at the same time propping up entirely undemocratic systems of governance and operation.
Plus, if we are only to point our fingers at Vodafone, the multinational may skip bail with the next forecast, just like Vodafone is currently considering. Good bye to Egypt, hello to India.
If we are reading the Financial Times, we will perhaps get a sense of how big and powerful Vodafone is in the business world. Vodafone has been forming partner network agreements with and buying majority holdings in national-based telecommunications operators throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Vodafone is spreading its wings with the breathtaking span of the globe, becoming the world’s largest mobile phone group with sales of more than US $ 58 billion and a market value of more than US $ 112 billion.
And with the news comes plenty of criticism. Customers in the UK, for example, expressed their grievances over Vodafone’s mobile call cost increase without any prior notification. We know about shareholders’ disgust at a few dozen people becoming extraordinarily wealthy from Vodafone’s acquisition of Mannesmann. We even hear criticism from bankers and investors, who, in 2005, accused Vodafone of being overly aggressive in the bond markets by issuing a US $ 880 million bond.
The veneer of its imperturbability begins to peel away, revealing cracks at the seams.
However, little is made public of the internal workings of Vodafone, except perhaps for board-CEO clashes, and yet, much is revealed from the inside, not only of Vodafone but of our times.
In Egypt the word on the street – among mini-bus drivers, recent college graduates and middle class professionals alike – is that Vodafone is one of the best companies to work for. The salaries are among the highest, the benefits among the most comprehensive, promotions and perks common.
Beyond this exclusive club of formal employment, however, lies a pool of subcontracted workers. Subcontractors with Vodafone hire workers with no contracts or benefits. In fact, being a non-Vodafone employee of Vodafone may be described as driving through a hurricane with a quick entrance and an exit that does not come quickly enough.
To illustrate, this year half of one cohort of Vodafone call center agents, hired by subcontracted employment agencies, left the job within the first three months – and about half of these employees left during or at the completion of the first month of training.
Non-married students and foreigners with varying levels of competent English language skills are attracted to Vodafone’s call center agent positions because the wage is nearly two times the competitive wage of entry-level professional positions in private firms in Cairo. It is slightly above the competitive rate of call center wages (excluding commissions).
Why then such high turnover? There are three ways to frame the answer: First, these unofficial employees are without a contract and ‘sign up’ for the job by signing away their rights and non-work life. Vodafone has expectations and requirements of its call center agents, and yet, does not make most of these known or clear. At the same time, Vodafone holds its agents responsible for what remains unspoken. For example, if an agent is absent from work two days in a row (without prior authorization), three days of pay is taken from the agent’s pay check. Without a contract, agents often only ‘discover’ this when they are confronted with the fact that they did not get paid for a day that they worked.
It is an infuriating double standard: The employer is not held accountable for anything, and at the same time, holds the employees responsible.
Second, the ‘your time is our time’ principle holds: The employee’s own time is at the whim of the employer. Call center agents are expected to stay until their supervisors tell them that they are finished for the day, even if that requires them to stay past their shift. The schedule regularly changes and the next week’s schedule remains unknown until the day/night of the next shift, making advanced non-work scheduling impossible. Agents are expected to arrive to the Vodafone premises 30 minutes before the ‘official’(i.e. paid) start of their shift, and they are expected to upload all applications within 15 minutes of the start. All of this is the employees’ time, taken for free by Vodafone.
Employees who rely on Vodafone transportation often arrive an hour before the start of the shift, spending three and a half to four hours total en route to and from Vodafone premises. Streamlining transportation costs, Vodafone pick-ups and drop-offs are at unreasonable times, such as a pick-up two hours before a shift at 4 in the morning! In the end employees spend nearly all of their waking hours during the work week either at work or going to and from work.
Third, the great contradiction of the post-Fordist era – the contradictory pull between ‘efficiency’ and ‘quality’ – is also borne squarely on the shoulders of the call center agents and their supervisors applying the pressure. This pressure to meet efficiency targets comes at the expense of quality customer service.
The streamlining of personnel costs, plus the general push to the bottom in terms of quality in the design to production to distribution stages, translates into a near constant furry of customer calls coupled with the constant pressure to get rid of the customers as quickly as possible.
In a degraded work environment, such as that in Egypt, this type of humiliating work becomes not only permissible but desirable. As Egypt’s General Authority for Investment proudly claims, Egypt’s wages are “among the most competitive in the region.” Or in other words, labour conditions are among the worst in the region.
But it is not as if workers in Egypt are just swallowing it. For the last five years there has been unprecedented protest among Egyptian workers – from factory workers to professionals – for public sector layoffs and low wages. And of course less dramatic than collective protest is saying high and dry ‘good bye’. The call center agent job may be attractive but for many its attraction wears quickly. The agents leave and Vodafone loses. There is no stability for workers but there is also no loyalty for employers, who then face hiring and training an incoming cohort.
Struggles are and should be waged for agreed-upon work conditions, with full employment rights and dignity of the person. However, we must not stop at the door of multinationals.
After all, Vodafone reflects and informs trends in the corporate world – of a two-tiered labor force (those with contracts and those without), of a revolving door (promises turned into grievances), of low costs and low quality. Low in-country investment and contributions to anything that may be called “development.”
This trend is not exclusive to the corporate world. Vodafone Egypt is part and parcel of the larger world of work, in Egypt and beyond. The work at Vodafone’s call centres is characteristic of work in the private and public sectors, in a neo-liberal era of stripped labour rights, steep hierarchy and weak stability.
Vodafone Egypt provides its call centre agents not a training befit of the latest approaches to work-based learning, but rather a run of the mill training en par with a 9th grade classroom in any private school in Egypt – a learning environment of control, that strips students of their sense of self and capabilities – an environment entirely befitting of work in Egypt.
It is exactly the privatization and liberalization policies that have propped up such an environment to which our attention and struggles must extend. More than two decades of such policies have created a regulatory framework that has only reinforced a culture of hierarchy and control, leaving workers of all stripes with few protections and rights. Deregulation of the private sector has ended up attracting multinationals like Vodafone to Egypt and at the same time propping up entirely undemocratic systems of governance and operation.
Plus, if we are only to point our fingers at Vodafone, the multinational may skip bail with the next forecast, just like Vodafone is currently considering. Good bye to Egypt, hello to India.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Bodies II
I felt that I did not do justice to Orbach’s book in the first entry, hence, this “Bodies” entry clarification.
Orbach is actually advancing two arguments in her 2009 book, the first of which is that “bodies are and always have been shaped according to the specific cultural moment,” and the second being what I summarized in the previous entry – how our body sense or our relationship to our bodies is being shaped at this cultural moment.
In other words, Orbach is addressing the question of “why bodies?!” If in this cultural moment, there is intense commercialization and commodification and distress over the body – why the body? What is it about this relationship that is important or vulnerable?
A first point: Everything from how we walk to the way we speak to what we eat to how we mark ourselves – all are indications of bodies belonging to a certain time and place.
A second point: There is a biological projection onto the body. For instance, scientific studies have shown that the human body is capable of feeling what is not there, such as feeling a limb that is no longer. Another example is how human infants learn to walk, develop their cultural specific gaits and so on. Humans may not have a mirror neuron system, but Orbach contends that there clearly appears to be a cellular function of how to move by observation before one has made the movement.
From this Orbach weaves together a delicate telling of how intricately our emotions and bodies are tied together. One way in which she illustrates the body-mind complex is by making a case for the importance of touch – touch being “the most basic and fundamental of human experiences.”
Rene Spitz, a Hungarian-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, reported from a wartime hospital in the 1940s that babies who received the same feeding and changing but were closer to the nurses’ station and received more touches had a higher rate of survival. Spitz also compared babies raised by mothers in a penal institution who were raised by their mothers the first year of their lives with babies who were raised in a hospital who had less than an eighth of an individual nurse’s attention. The babies raised in the hospital suffered from illness or skin diseases as well as development lags.
Another example: Scientists have discovered that the physical process of touching raises the level of a bonding hormone, oxytocin. Oxytocin helps us be receptive to soothing, calming and closeness. In contrast, those exposed to much stress or brutal touch have raised levels of the stress-related hormone called cortisol. The effects of high cortisol can be permanently damaging, because the person is readied to seek out stress. And the way stress is relieved is by increased stress, as the body’s opiates kick in with heightened stress.
A discomforting argument that she is making is that how we are touched and generally the physical sense of our caregivers as young people deeply affects our relationship to our bodies as adults. In other words, it is not just that we as young people are exposed to disquieting images on the television, but that we are disquieted in part because of the dis-ease carried from the generation of our parents.
This argument may seem to put extraordinary responsibility on the caregiver for an epidemic as large as body distress! However, the author’s point is more profound. Again, we must move away from “thinking of our bodies as just existing, propelled to grow by reasonable nutrition and genetic inheritance,” and rather think of them as part of a cultural moment with its emotions, neurosis, preoccupations. For Orbach we can not understand the disquietude of the ‘acceptable body’ today – and its particularly tight contours for girls and women – if we do not understand the historical trajectory of the unhappy physical sense of selves.
And this seems to be more profoundly revealing than any narrow interpretation of personality formation that derives from story telling of the modern self.
Orbach is actually advancing two arguments in her 2009 book, the first of which is that “bodies are and always have been shaped according to the specific cultural moment,” and the second being what I summarized in the previous entry – how our body sense or our relationship to our bodies is being shaped at this cultural moment.
In other words, Orbach is addressing the question of “why bodies?!” If in this cultural moment, there is intense commercialization and commodification and distress over the body – why the body? What is it about this relationship that is important or vulnerable?
A first point: Everything from how we walk to the way we speak to what we eat to how we mark ourselves – all are indications of bodies belonging to a certain time and place.
A second point: There is a biological projection onto the body. For instance, scientific studies have shown that the human body is capable of feeling what is not there, such as feeling a limb that is no longer. Another example is how human infants learn to walk, develop their cultural specific gaits and so on. Humans may not have a mirror neuron system, but Orbach contends that there clearly appears to be a cellular function of how to move by observation before one has made the movement.
From this Orbach weaves together a delicate telling of how intricately our emotions and bodies are tied together. One way in which she illustrates the body-mind complex is by making a case for the importance of touch – touch being “the most basic and fundamental of human experiences.”
Rene Spitz, a Hungarian-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, reported from a wartime hospital in the 1940s that babies who received the same feeding and changing but were closer to the nurses’ station and received more touches had a higher rate of survival. Spitz also compared babies raised by mothers in a penal institution who were raised by their mothers the first year of their lives with babies who were raised in a hospital who had less than an eighth of an individual nurse’s attention. The babies raised in the hospital suffered from illness or skin diseases as well as development lags.
Another example: Scientists have discovered that the physical process of touching raises the level of a bonding hormone, oxytocin. Oxytocin helps us be receptive to soothing, calming and closeness. In contrast, those exposed to much stress or brutal touch have raised levels of the stress-related hormone called cortisol. The effects of high cortisol can be permanently damaging, because the person is readied to seek out stress. And the way stress is relieved is by increased stress, as the body’s opiates kick in with heightened stress.
A discomforting argument that she is making is that how we are touched and generally the physical sense of our caregivers as young people deeply affects our relationship to our bodies as adults. In other words, it is not just that we as young people are exposed to disquieting images on the television, but that we are disquieted in part because of the dis-ease carried from the generation of our parents.
This argument may seem to put extraordinary responsibility on the caregiver for an epidemic as large as body distress! However, the author’s point is more profound. Again, we must move away from “thinking of our bodies as just existing, propelled to grow by reasonable nutrition and genetic inheritance,” and rather think of them as part of a cultural moment with its emotions, neurosis, preoccupations. For Orbach we can not understand the disquietude of the ‘acceptable body’ today – and its particularly tight contours for girls and women – if we do not understand the historical trajectory of the unhappy physical sense of selves.
And this seems to be more profoundly revealing than any narrow interpretation of personality formation that derives from story telling of the modern self.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
body dis-ease
What is a large and growing epidemic of global proportions about which little is heard? Could it even be there is an epidemic which is weakly addressed? Could it be that it is growing at alarming speed but with little alert?
According to Susie Orbach, British psychotherapist and social critic, there is indeed such a epidemic – and it is very real. It is what she calls body distress.
I could scarcely say I know someone in the global North who does not suffer from body distress, which may come as a surprise to those who know me. And having spent significant amounts of time in the global South, I could say quite definitely I have recognized and continue to recognize signs of this distress in nearly every place I have been.
But what is body distress? You may be saying, “I do not fuss over my weight or my looks and yet you are saying that I am likely suffering from some sort of body distress?”
Orbach argues in her 2009 book Bodies that until recently we humans essentially took our bodies for granted. Our bodies were shaped by each cultural moment, as they are today by this cultural moment, but we produced things with them. Now, in this era of what she refers to as late capitalism, in industrialized societies our bodies have become the production itself, and thus, our body “is judged as our individual production” (p 5). For instance, what used to be taken for granted as natural processes in the life cycle – such as body changes due to child birth or facial wrinkles due to aging – have become unwanted and in need of manipulation.
Other signs of body distress may be dieting (and the exploding dieting industry) or eating disorders (overeating, under eating, binge eating) or skyrocketing profits of the cosmetic industry or even psychosomatic disorders (like irritable bowl syndrome and eczema).
The signs are many but clearly this epidemic shows itself in the singularizing notions of beauty. Orbach argues that no longer is bodily transformation a part of social ritual, but rather it is about creating an acceptable body – and what is ‘acceptable’ is narrowing worldwide, especially for women (p 82).
Recently I went with a friend to a festival of short Egyptian films. One of the clips was about a young, single Egyptian man who recently returned to Egypt from abroad. He had a neighbor who talked non-stop about his lovely wife, and the young man was awaiting to see this beauty to whom his neighbor referred. A climactic moment in the film is when the neighbor opens the door to introduce his wife, a woman who is visibly large and who takes on a jolly-go-lucky persona. And at that moment the audience laughs hysterically.
The vision of the beautiful wife was apparently shattered at the site of a round woman with a double chin. When I express my dismay to my friend, she kindly tries to explain to me that in Egypt “we like women with a …figure.”
One of the theoretical arguments Orbach is making in Bodies is that body distress is not necessarily about compensating for something else, as is commonly believed, but rather reflects “the conundrum of how to have a body” (p 74) or “bodily disenfranchisement” (p 75). Her theory, in contradiction to what she refers to as the most current theory, is that situating the origins of distress in the mind fails to fully capture the dis-ease that pertains to the body. Rather, it is more challenging to understand body distress as “a signal of a body that is struggling to express itself and its needs, or even to exist” (p 76).
In this way, she is refusing to single out commercial interests as the problem, but at the same time fully recognizes that “fashion’s handmaidens in the diet, food and pharmaceutical industries a nefarious role, adding to a sense of our bodies being a battleground” (p 94).
In other words, it is clearly not enough to talk about “The Price of Beauty,” as the new VH1 series refers to cultural practices related to prescriptions of beauty. This is not just about diverse specifications of beauty but about growing pressure on women and men to have an acceptable body – and those growing pressures are largely informed by commercial interests or religious doctrines. Highly processed foods and drinks, same-same glossy and digitalized images on the tv and movie screens, damning prescriptions from religious sects.
And let us not be deceived that the distress comes from failing to achieve the standard. It may seem so, we may try to convince ourselves it is so – if only I had thinner legs, less freckles, lighter skin – but the point of the commodified body is that it is not attainable. It is not that you can’t thin your legs, but that the project of working and reworking is ongoing.
As someone who has spent most of her professional life promoting healthy bodies, Susie Orbach does not just stop at the critique. She urges us, as products of this cultural moment, to take our bodies for granted and enjoy them!
According to Susie Orbach, British psychotherapist and social critic, there is indeed such a epidemic – and it is very real. It is what she calls body distress.
I could scarcely say I know someone in the global North who does not suffer from body distress, which may come as a surprise to those who know me. And having spent significant amounts of time in the global South, I could say quite definitely I have recognized and continue to recognize signs of this distress in nearly every place I have been.
But what is body distress? You may be saying, “I do not fuss over my weight or my looks and yet you are saying that I am likely suffering from some sort of body distress?”
Orbach argues in her 2009 book Bodies that until recently we humans essentially took our bodies for granted. Our bodies were shaped by each cultural moment, as they are today by this cultural moment, but we produced things with them. Now, in this era of what she refers to as late capitalism, in industrialized societies our bodies have become the production itself, and thus, our body “is judged as our individual production” (p 5). For instance, what used to be taken for granted as natural processes in the life cycle – such as body changes due to child birth or facial wrinkles due to aging – have become unwanted and in need of manipulation.
Other signs of body distress may be dieting (and the exploding dieting industry) or eating disorders (overeating, under eating, binge eating) or skyrocketing profits of the cosmetic industry or even psychosomatic disorders (like irritable bowl syndrome and eczema).
The signs are many but clearly this epidemic shows itself in the singularizing notions of beauty. Orbach argues that no longer is bodily transformation a part of social ritual, but rather it is about creating an acceptable body – and what is ‘acceptable’ is narrowing worldwide, especially for women (p 82).
Recently I went with a friend to a festival of short Egyptian films. One of the clips was about a young, single Egyptian man who recently returned to Egypt from abroad. He had a neighbor who talked non-stop about his lovely wife, and the young man was awaiting to see this beauty to whom his neighbor referred. A climactic moment in the film is when the neighbor opens the door to introduce his wife, a woman who is visibly large and who takes on a jolly-go-lucky persona. And at that moment the audience laughs hysterically.
The vision of the beautiful wife was apparently shattered at the site of a round woman with a double chin. When I express my dismay to my friend, she kindly tries to explain to me that in Egypt “we like women with a …figure.”
One of the theoretical arguments Orbach is making in Bodies is that body distress is not necessarily about compensating for something else, as is commonly believed, but rather reflects “the conundrum of how to have a body” (p 74) or “bodily disenfranchisement” (p 75). Her theory, in contradiction to what she refers to as the most current theory, is that situating the origins of distress in the mind fails to fully capture the dis-ease that pertains to the body. Rather, it is more challenging to understand body distress as “a signal of a body that is struggling to express itself and its needs, or even to exist” (p 76).
In this way, she is refusing to single out commercial interests as the problem, but at the same time fully recognizes that “fashion’s handmaidens in the diet, food and pharmaceutical industries a nefarious role, adding to a sense of our bodies being a battleground” (p 94).
In other words, it is clearly not enough to talk about “The Price of Beauty,” as the new VH1 series refers to cultural practices related to prescriptions of beauty. This is not just about diverse specifications of beauty but about growing pressure on women and men to have an acceptable body – and those growing pressures are largely informed by commercial interests or religious doctrines. Highly processed foods and drinks, same-same glossy and digitalized images on the tv and movie screens, damning prescriptions from religious sects.
And let us not be deceived that the distress comes from failing to achieve the standard. It may seem so, we may try to convince ourselves it is so – if only I had thinner legs, less freckles, lighter skin – but the point of the commodified body is that it is not attainable. It is not that you can’t thin your legs, but that the project of working and reworking is ongoing.
As someone who has spent most of her professional life promoting healthy bodies, Susie Orbach does not just stop at the critique. She urges us, as products of this cultural moment, to take our bodies for granted and enjoy them!
Friday, March 26, 2010
Taker Culture
How you know you are solidly within Taker Culture, a culture systematically destroying the web of life*:
It is believable or seems feasible or fails to seem utterly ridiculous that –
God created the earth and the creatures on the earth and THEN man to be God’s “successor” or to have dominion over all other beings on earth.
God is ego-maniacal – i.e., demanding and expecting praise from humans.
There is eternal continuity of the self or Ego.
Your kitten is naughty when he tries to bite you!
(Fill in)
* For the reference to “Taker Culture,” see Daniel Quinn’s books Ishmael and The Story of B.
It is believable or seems feasible or fails to seem utterly ridiculous that –
God created the earth and the creatures on the earth and THEN man to be God’s “successor” or to have dominion over all other beings on earth.
God is ego-maniacal – i.e., demanding and expecting praise from humans.
There is eternal continuity of the self or Ego.
Your kitten is naughty when he tries to bite you!
(Fill in)
* For the reference to “Taker Culture,” see Daniel Quinn’s books Ishmael and The Story of B.
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