It’s unlikely to see Mahalla now rising against Sisi, but such industrial actions are slowly laying the seeds of what could be a full-fledged challenge to the ruling junta in the coming years.

UPDATE: The strike has been suspended on Saturday.

This is a music track I put together in 2008 following the April Mahalla uprising, where I mixed Yann Tiersen’s “Summer ’78” piano piece with anti-Mubarak chants I had recorded previously during Kefaya protests.

Finally, the talented photographer/multimedia journalist and friend James Buck added the music track to a slide show of photos, taken by Nasser Nouri and edited into black and white by me, of the uprising.

The Mahalla workers, on 17 February 2008, were the first to put forward the demand, for raising the national minimum wage to LE1,200 per month, after it stagnated at LE35 per month since 1984. Nazif’s neoliberal cabinet only raised it to LE400 last year.

Following the uprising, Essam Sharaf’s cabinet had announced it’d raise the minimum wage to only LE700, despite condemnations from labor groups and NGOs. But shockingly now the military junta has officially endorsed the new government budget whereby the national minimum wage had been further reduced to LE684, with more austerity measures taken:

Field Marshal Muhammad Hussein Tantawy, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), has endorsed the 2011/2012 state budget after it was amended and approved by the cabinet.
The total budget expenditure was amended from LE515 billion to LE491 billion, of which 54 percent would be directed to social projects.
The minimum wage was reduced from LE700 to LE684 per month as of July, with an annual total of LE9 billion to be paid in wages for two million government employees.
Expenditure on education decreased from LE55 billion to LE 52 billion, health from LE24 billion to LE23.8 billion, and housing from LE21 billion to LE16.7 billion.