Hossam el-Hamalawy
From AFP…
Hundreds of Sinai Bedouins protested on Wednesday against the detention of one of their tribesmen, burning tires and blocking roads on the peninsula, a security official said.
“Hundreds of Bedouins from north Sinai have blocked roads in the Mahdia area near the Israeli border to protest against the detention of one Bedouin,” the official told AFP, adding that they were setting tires ablaze.
The man, Mahmoud Hassan Al-Menei, 40, was held on Tuesday without charge.
The Egyptian Workers and Trade Unions Watch has issued its report on the industrial action in April.
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.