Work, Property and Class in Revolutionary Egypt

My project is an ethnographic study of work relations at the Egyptian Iron and Steel Company (EISCO). EISCO is Egypt’s oldest fully-integrated public sector steel plant. It is located in Helwan, a large industrial town in the south of Cairo. The research investigates long-term trajectories of property relations that divide workers’ communities, making some more like the middle classes, and others perpetually proletariat. My research builds upon previous fieldwork between 2008-2010 on the shop-floors and in the company town of EISCO. In that work I examined how public sector work contracts known as wazīfa are inherited be the children of steel workers, which distinguishes them and their families from other contract workers around the plant.The new project investigates economic and political transformations of the relation between company and contract workers since the start of the revolution of January 2011. I continue to focus on competing claims to property - from land ownership, to stable work contracts and to educational credentials, which reproduce divisions among workers. With EISCO’s future increasingly uncertain and its workers learning new forms of protest, I ask how their conceptions of “a good life” in the present revolutionary context inform class relations.