Doctors' strike postponed

Less than one week after Mubarak’s PM Ahmad Nazif threatened doctors and civil servants planning strikes, the Doctors’ Syndicate board decided to back down and postpone indefinitely the two-hour strike that had been scheduled 15 March.

The doctors held a demonstration on the same day as the Syndicate board meeting was in process. This time, they didn’t enjoy the backing of the Syndicate.. Even Hamdi el-Sayyed, the syndicate head, neither stopped to talk nor sent any gestures to the protesters, as he was getting into the building. It’s clear the syndicate board is coming under huge pressure from the regime. But having postponed the strike doesn’t mean the tension within the ranks of the doctors is gone. The government will have to come up with a compromise that the Syndicate Board—led by the good ol’ Hamdi who’s VERY KEEN about solving this issue asap and not let it escalate—can secure the backing of the coming General Assembly on 21 March. The doctors have been demanding LE1000 as a minimum salary. Will the govt agree to that? I can hardly imagine.

“Doctors Without Rights,” a new front of mainly secular leftist doctors, is still not as strong in lobbying the Syndicate board as the Muslim Brothers. The latter have been playing a positive role in the current struggle in the syndicate, but we still have to see if they’ll take the fight till the end, or will their doctors agree to some compromise in the current context of continuous security crackdowns on the organization. From what activist sources in Cairo are saying, the current rebellion is not necessarily colored by any political force, though everyone from leftists, Arab Nationalists to Islamists are there and participating.

In a statement, Doctors Without Rights announced they were going ahead with a sit-in on 15 March at the Doctors’ Syndicate HQ in el-Qasr el-Eini St. The sit-in will continue to 21 March, the day when the Syndicate’s General Meeting should convene.

Nazif’s statements are not new, and I hope our doctors remember that. Virtually ALL OF THE WORKERS’ STRIKE OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS HAVE BEEN ILLEGAL. I mean all of them. Not a single one—according to 2003 Unified Labor Law, which imposed more draconian restrictions on the workers’ right to organize, unionize and strike—is legal.

Nazif’s claims about the tax collectors being the only “exception” to be allowed to strike although they are considered a “strategic” sector are horseshit. We all know the govt was forced to compromise and meet the strikers’ demands after a fascinating national coordination that included 55,000 of them and the public embarrassment they caused the regime by their camp in downtown Cairo. Also, workers in other sectors deemed “strategic” by the regime went on strike, like the case of the railway workers, underground metro drivers, maintenance workers and cashiers, the postal service workers, Public Transport drivers and hospital workers… These all fall under the “strategic” classification of the Mubarak’s regime. But the workers still went on strikes. Other sectors, also considered “strategic,” witnessed protests and sit-ins, but not necessarily strikes, like the Grain Mills, whose workers staged protests in spring 2007, and organized a demonstration in solidarity with the September 2007 Mahalla strike.

And finally, I leave you with these photos, taken by Sarah Carr, of the doctors’ protest that took place Sunday in front of syndicate.

UPDATE: I received a new statement from Doctors Without Rights, which you can download here.

The statement strongly condemned PM Nazif and the Doctors’ Syndicate’s board, openly accusing the latter of betraying the doctors. The statement also called on all doctors to send delegations from their hospitals to the sit-in to be organized on 15 March, instead of the strike, and is to last till 21 March, when the General Assembly convenes.

There will be daily protests, coupled with the sit-in, on the doorsteps of the syndicate from 3 to 5pm. The statement also included the blog address of the campaign, which you can check out here.