CAIRO —The more than 200 strikes are over. Tens of thousands of workers are back on their jobs, having won several small but important victories in the most widespread labor unrest in Egypt in decades. But the Center for Trade Union & Workers Services (CTUWS) is out of business, its four offices closed and its activities banned in retaliation by the Egyptian government for the role it allegedly played in sparking the strikes.

Kamal Abbas doesn’t flinch at the question, “We did not call for the strikes, but we have programs and trainings on workers’ rights, and they have the right to strike. We support them if they do have a strike.”

We’re meeting with Abbas, the founder and General Coordinator of CTUWS, in a neat but spare office inside a crumbling down building in the Helwan Industrial District twenty minutes south of Cairo. Most of the walled and barbed wire factories in the District appear to be closed, their guard towers empty. The Helwan residential street we’re visiting is lined with once-grand apartment buildings, now lying in ruins as if they belonged in Beruit. Like the rest of Cairo, it’s a study in contrasts: Late model cars are parked fender-to-bumper with ancient broken-down junkers. Neatly dressed men and women, some of the women in head-to-toe naqubs with their faces covered, others in Levi’s with shawls and only their hair covered, share the street young boys in rags driving donkey carts piled high with produce or junk.

Abbas, a wiry, handsome labour veteran still under forty, is dressed in a collared knit shirt, jeans and black Italian loafers. A steel worker, he led the successful strike at the Egyptian Iron Works in Heyman in 1989, when 19,000 workers walked out to gain a wage increase and a meal a day and were attacked by 10,000 riot police firing rubber bullets, and tear gas canisters. Abbas was jailed four times in the ensuing months. In March 1990, he and a group of labor leaders launched CTUWS, vowing to support the needs of workers (who in Egypt average making barely $2.00 U.S. per day) and fill the void created by a single national union controlled by the government.

Apparently, CTUWS succeeded all too well: On March 29, the government shut down the CTUW office in the city of Naj Hamadi. Its office in Mahalla was closed in on April 10. Then on April 25 at 10 A.M., fifteen police officers backed by several hundred soldiers surrounded the organization’s headquarters in Helwan, forced the staff into the street and shut it down. After two hours, the same security forced shuttered a second CTUWS office in Helwan.

“They accused us of spreading a culture of strikes,” says Abbas. “Yes, we spread a culture of strikes. It’s a right.”

The strikes started in December 2006 in public sector textile factories where wages are 446 Egyptian pounds per month (about $75 U.S. dollars). Workers were upset at the results of sham union elections, which were controlled by the government, and at the refusal of authorities to implement bonuses which had been awarded but not issued. Many workers were losing their jobs as Egypt began to privatize it basic industries, and wages in the private sector factories were being forced steadily downward. The union, which is similar to the All China Free Trade Union in that country, operates as an arm of the authoritarian Egyptian government. Abbas explains there was no violence against the strikers and that after two or three months, union and management began negotiations.

“The strikes were as much against the union as the government,” says Abbas, explaining that the strikes were triggered by the fake union elections and the attempt to renege on bonuses. “Now it was like the government was negotiating with the government.” He says the workers eventually came away with the bonuses that had been promised, but little else, and that strikes are continuing to crop up.

Abbas explains that what’s needed are policies to deal with the transition of public sector factories to the private sector, where there is not even a government union to join. “We know we are living in a dictatorship, in a closed society, so we have to make demands. We are on the right track. We will come back.”

CTUWS has received a petition of support from more than twenty Egyptian Civil Society Organizations as well as letters of support from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Public Services International, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, the ITUC, the ILO, as well as labour organizations and unions in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and the UK. Messages of protest and support should be directed to: His Excellency Hosni Mubarak, President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, ‘Abdin Palace, Cairo, Egypt.

Note: A version of this report was previously posted on the AFL-CIO news blog.

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