Tomorrow Wednesday, 7pm, a forum is organized by the Press Syndicate Liberties Committee in solidarity with trade unionists from El-Amiriya Textile Factory, El-Hennawy Tobacco Company and others.
Tag: cairo
TE engineers go on strike demanding better pay; Lawyers demonstrate against police torture
From the Daily News Egypt:
Telecom Egypt’s transmission engineers reportedly went on strike in several governorates on Sunday, objecting to the discrepancies in salaries between engineers within the company, press reports said on Monday.
According to Al-Masry Al-Youm daily newspaper, engineers sent an internal email calling for a strike, which brought work to a halt at the Ramses, Tanta, Alexandria, Suez and Sharqeya call centers.
“We are tired of false promises given by management that our salaries and bonuses will increase,” the email said.
They claimed that their salaries were only LE 1,000, when other engineers got paid up to LE 15,000.
The engineers on strike did not call for pay raises to match the salaries of employees in private telecom companies, instead saying “we want to at least get paid as much as the engineers in the [company’s] IT department.”
Sources inside the government-owned company told Daily News Egypt that IT engineers are under a bonus system, which the striking transmission engineers are excluded from.
“Transmission engineers usually receive an average salary of $3,000 in other companies in Egypt,” the source, who preferred to remain anonymous, said. In Telecom Egypt, those engineers earn LE 1,500-2,000 a month, if not less, the source added.
However, the source continued, the IT engineers are not that much better off. The big bonuses usually go to top management, while most of the engineers get “minimal and unstable” bonuses, the source said.
According to the striking employees, more than 20 employees from the Ramses call center left their jobs last month after feeling “discriminated against.”
The email called on all engineers to participate in the strike, until Minister of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) Tarek Kamel interferes to solve the “injustice.”
The MCIT refused to comment on the strike, saying they had not received information that there were any strikes at Telecom Egypt.
In other news, the HMLC blog is reporting that 300 lawyers are staging a protest in front of Hadayeq el-Qobba Police Station, after a lawyer by the name Magdi Ibrahim Taha was assaulted by the police and tortured in custody. By the way, this police station building also hosts the notorious Hadayeq el-Qobba State Security office.
Families in Abo Regeila face eviction as army prepares to move in
From Sarah Carr:
Hundreds of families who have lived in makeshift housing next to a railway track for over 20 years are facing the threat of eviction, as Egyptian army troops prepare to remove them from their homes.
The families, who live in Arab Abo Regeila in the El-Salam district of northern Cairo, have not been offered alternative housing.
“These families have lived in Abo Regeila for years without anyone troubling them,” Muhammad Abdel Azim of the Egyptian Center for Housing Rights (ECHR) told Daily News Egypt.
“They were told that the army would be evicting them on the June 30 but have not been offered alternative housing. The reason why they are being evicted isn’t clear; nobody knows exactly what the plans are for this land,” Abdel Azim continued.
While the legal status of the land is unclear, it is surrounded by land owned by the Egyptian army, including an amusement park, Hadiqet El-Badr, also owned by the army.
There are unconfirmed rumors that the army wants to evict the families in order to expand the amusement park.
Living conditions in Arab Abo Regeila are desperate. Families live in either shacks or basic one-storey brick houses constructed on the banks of the Cairo-Suez railway line.
There is no running water. One inhabitant told Daily News Egypt that she collects water from a neighboring factory. And pools of lurid green stagnant water attract flies and mosquitoes.
Daily News Egypt also saw an exposed swamp into which live sewage was being pumped, located between houses. Residents said that small children have fallen into the swamp.
“Of course, I’d leave if I had the chance. Why would anyone choose to stay here living in this filth? But where can I go? I can only leave if my children and I are given somewhere else to go where we can earn a living,” one woman told Daily News Egypt.
Many of Arab Abo Regeila’s residents earn a living by collecting and selling cardboard, which is stacked up almost everywhere in Arab Abo Regeila.
One woman said that the cardboard she sells every 15 days earns her around LE 150.
She said that she uses this money to visit her son, who has been imprisoned for violating the terms of his military service because the family could not afford to lose his source of income.
Another woman told Daily News Egypt that she sells a kilogram of cardboard for 10 piastres.
While some of their children attend school, economic circumstances have forced many of the families to send their children to work on the donkey carts used to collect cardboard.