Plastic sandals, tea and time: Shop floor politics and culture in Egypt

This dissertation examines shop floor politics and culture in Egypt. I analyze how working class identity emerges at the point of production; how 'economic relations' inside the factory are simultaneously relations of signification and meaning; and how the production of commodities is, at the same time, the production of categories of identity, patterns of interacting and understandings of self and other.;What many have taken for granted---individuals becoming conscious of themselves as 'workers' with distinct identities and interests---must, in fact, be explained. People do not become proletarians simply by entering factories or because of the positions they occupy in the division of labor. The question becomes, therefore, how is proletarian identity constructed?;Through participant-observation, working as a winding machine operator in two Egyptian textile factories, I found that the social relations in production are essential in determining how individuals come to understand themselves and their interests. The way the factory is organized profoundly shapes how individuals think of themselves and others.;'Worker' is a category of identity whose substantive content is produced and reproduced daily through both material and discursive practices. Social class turns out to be a system of meaning as well as a system of production. In the factory, small, everyday, mundane occurrences and practices that workers experience in common (plastic sandals, tea and time, for example)---seemingly insignificant in themselves---serve as crucial rituals in a continuous process of class formation. These common experiences and the shared culture they generate are the invisible cement that make collective identity possible. The factory, it turns out, produces more than wool and cotton woven fabric---it produces workers.;The research explores what class means concretely for ordinary Egyptian factory workers and provides, for the first time, a detailed account of the texture and fabric of their lives. Through an ethnographic analysis of everyday life inside the factory, the dissertation presents a unique perspective on the micro-dynamics of class formation.