Hossam el-Hamalawy
Around 1000 cement workers are currently staging two sit-ins south of Cairo in Helwan and Tebbin, demanding the 30% raise decreed by Mubarak last May, the “schools grant” (paid to workers in the fall to help them with the fees of their children schooling) and a compensation for the overtime work shifts they do.
No more details are available at the moment.
The early buy-out packages negotiations reached a dead end yesterday with militant trade unionists representing Suez, Tora and Helwan Cement workers rightly raising the ceiling of their demands to discourage the Italian management from cutting down the labor force in the company, following the December strikes.
The Factory Union Committee officials, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm, deliberately gave the management a set of high-ceiling demands they knew would be refused. While union officials played a sabotaging, pro-govt role in most of the current strikes, there are cases where few independent Factory Union Committees took the side of the workers, including the above mentioned cement companies.
The Cement workers in Tora, Helwan and Suez are refusing an early buyout scheme their Italian management is currently drafting, with the aim of cutting down the labor force.
Instead the workers want to buy the shares of the foreign management, and are proposing they (the workers) run the company themselves, promising to bring down the cement market price from LE400 per ton (expected to rise soon to LE600) to LE200.