It’s 6am. I received news that Ashraq Al-Awsat journalist Essam Fadl was detained by the police in Tahrir Square, and taken to Qasr el-Nil Police Station.
No more details are available yet.
Category: Blog
DSE on grain mills workers
A report by the Daily Star Egypt on the struggle of the grain mills workers in Cairo and Giza:
Strikes by flourmill workers ended Monday following a meeting that brought together union representatives from Cairo and Giza flourmills companies, and three cabinet ministers.
Magdy Abdel Azim, deputy head of the Union Committee of the North Cairo flour mills told The Daily Star Egypt that the workers were satisfied with the decision of Minister of Social Solidarity Ali Al-Moselhi, Minister of Labor Aicha Abdel Hady and Investment Minister Mahmoud Moheiddin to freeze a decree by Al-Moselhi that would have cut workers’ monthly bonuses by 35 percent.
Over 5,000 workers at the North Cairo and South Cairo and Giza Flourmills had gone on strike last Thursday to protest Al-Moselhi’s decision to reduce the daily quota of wheat allocated to the North Cairo Mill by 429 tons and the quota to the South Cairo and Giza Flourmills by 413 tons.
“These cuts,” said Adel Azim, “threatened the very existence of our mills for the benefit of the private sector. They would have minimized our role in distributing the flour, not milling it.”
Workers’ bonuses, he continued, are tied to the mills’ production rate. The decision would have cost the workers two thirds of their salaries as well as their annual profit shares.
According to the daily Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper, the mill workers had temporarily ended the strike Friday night after promises by Secretary-General of the General Federation of Trade Unions Hussein Megawer that their demands will be met by Monday at the latest, when the issue was to be discussed at the People’s Assembly.
When nothing was done, the workers resumed the strike, raising the specter of a bread crisis in Cairo and Giza.
One correction though: the report states the workers were on strike. Actually, they were not. They staged sit-ins and marched inside the factory compound chanting anti-government slogans, but production still went on. This scared the government enough into submitting to the workers’ demands, especially when the company has branches in 14 provinces (including Cairo and Giza); the workers in the provinces were waiting to see how the govt will handle the negotiations and there were signs the sit-ins may spread to other branches, namely to Minya.
Fayoum trade unionist sacked
Thirty-four-year-old Ashraf Abdel Wanis is a father of four, who’s been working at the administrative affairs department of the state-owned Fayoum Sugar factory for nine years. His monthly basic salary is LE221.66, which goes up to LE638 with the bonuses and allowances.
The company has 500 workers on contracts, and another 200 on a seasonal basis. The factory works at its full capacity, during the sugar beads season, which lasts between February and June.
The factory witnessed a two-day strike in June 2006, during which Ashraf and his colleagues played a leading role, over a number of demands including increasing the LE1 daily food allowance to LE5, and forming a branch for the General Union for Food Industries at the factory, among other demands (There were 14 demands in total). The management agreed to increase the daily food allowance only to LE2, and allowed the workers to form a Factory Union Committee, whose elections took place last fall, promising to look into the rest of the demands that had to do with workers’ shares of profits. Ashraf managed to win a union seat.
The management, using carrots and sticks, managed to impose an engineer by the name Khaled Abu Bakr as the Factory Union Committee’s president. He, together with the management, have been launching a witch-hunt against Ashraf and others involved in last year’s strike, especially as the latter were lobbying for increasing the shares of workers in the annual profits made by the company, as well as increasing the transportation and housing allowances.
On 5 March, Ashraf was transferred to another department within the factory. The manamgent suspended him from his job on 10 March, and sacked him finally on 22 March, alleging he had not shown up for work without medical notice.
In an interview to Al-Massa’ia on 21 March, however, Khaled Abu Bakr, the pro-management head of the Factory Union Committee stated that “Ashraf Abdel Wanis was transferred to a disciplinary board for investigating his role in agitating the workers about profit shares.”
Ashraf is filing a lawsuit, and planning to stage a sit-in, together with other trade unionists at the General Union for Food Industries, in Nasr City, next week if the Labor Ministry does not get involved to revoke the management’s dismissal decree.