Hossam el-Hamalawy
Via Al-Jazeera:
The US war in Iraq is lost and a further build-up of US troops in the country will not recover the situation, the senior Democrat in the US senate has said.
“This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week,” Harry Reid, the senate Democratic majority leader, told reporters.
There were 10 sit-ins, seven strikes and three demonstrations by Egyptian workers during March 2007, a report by Awlad el-Ard NGO says.
Meanwhile, 600 teachers and members of staff staged a sit-in yesterday in the Nile Delta town of Zagazig, to protest the abusive treatment by their bosses at the Muslim Youth schools.
In Cairo, 200 workers at Al-Arabiya brick-making factory are continuing their sit-in for the fourth day, to protest the liquidation of the company. Some workers have started a hunger strike; three were transferred to the hospital yesterday: Hanafi el-Sayyed, Mohamed Bashir, Zakaria Ahmad Khalil. The Ministry of Labor is busy organizing the May Day presidential ass-kissing carnival, and refuses to intervene.
In Dakahlya, 280 workers at Mansoura-España garments factory are threatening to stage a sit-in on 28 April–which will be the third industrial action they take in two months–to protest the delay in paying their salaries, and bonuses promised by the Ministry of Labor.
I received another statement from Kafr el-Dawar Textile Workers For Change, affirming their solidarity with the Ghazl el-Mahalla workers’ campaign to impeach their corrupt labor union officials and improve their work conditions.
The statement this time is written in colloquial Arabic. My sources in Kafr el-Dawar told me at least 300 copies of yesterday’s and today’s solidarity statements were distributed in the factory (which has a total labor force of 11,700 workers), and were positively received by the town’s workers.
Blogger Kareem el-Beheiry also reports that the two statements were warmly received by the Mahalla workers, and some already have made copies and started circulating them in Mahalla.