Egyptian Workers and Social Resistance: 368 industrial actions in 6 months

The 2nd issue of “Workers and Social Resistance,” produced by the Workers’ Coordination Committee is now available online.

The report documents 368 industrial actions (There’s a typo in the original report, as the figure is written 386 instead), in the private and public sectors as well as the civil servants (which the report puts them in a different category than the public sector), from January to July 2007: 100 Sit-ins, 109 Strikes, 33 Demonstrations, 126 illegal assemblies accompanied by a short-period work stoppages.

[368 in only six months. Remember the Land Center for Human Rights documented 222 industrial actions all throughout 2006, so we are way already beyond that for this year.]

But more troubling, the report stated that 26 workers committed suicide, while 75,000 lost their jobs. Also among the 129 cases of work-related injuries the report documented, 84 died. [No wonder in most of the strikes I covered last spring, one of the demands that was universally raised by strikers in different sectors had been the presence of an ambulance car inside the factory compounds to guarantee the quick transfer of any injured workers to the hospitals.]

From the 368 industrial actions, the report states that they are divided among the following: 121 in the Public Sector, 141 among Civil Servants, while 106 in the private sector.