Sarah Carr reports:
The National Railway Union agreed to two of the train drivers’ five demands when they met yesterday in El-Wosta, Beni Suef.
The drivers met union representatives to discuss a bundle of demands pertaining to allowances and working conditions.
Some 60 drivers held a protest before the meeting during which they held up banners listing their demands. This follows the five-hour protest held last week on March 2.
Negotiations between drivers and the union lasted for approximately one hour. Drivers listed a bundle of demands, most of which pertain to wage parity with drivers based elsewhere in Egypt.
The union agreed to the payment of an allowance which drivers are entitled to under a decree issued five years ago, but which has not been paid in full to drivers based in El-Wosta.
Back payment of this allowance will add up to a roughly LE 1,500 lump sum for many drivers.
The union also agreed to drivers’ demand that they receive an allowance given to drivers for standby fire engine shifts.
The union did not accept drivers’ demands to receive health insurance like their counterparts based in Minya. In addition, the drivers’ principal demand — that they report to the central Cairo office rather than Assiut — is “under consideration.”
Note here that the negotiations, like in many other cases, were conducted between “representatives of the workers” and “union members.” Now, in theory a labor union should be the “representative” of the laborers in a workplace, and the one to lobby for their interests vis a vis the management. But not in Egypt and other dictatorships, where the unions are decoy, state-sponsored, and more or less part of the govt, and the workers understand whose side they are on.
The overwhelming majority of the strikes happening over the past couple of years were opposed by the local unions and the Federation. In Kafr el-Dawar, the strikers “detained” the Factory Union Committee members to force them to join the occupation, while in Mahalla the workers hospitalized Seddiq Siyam the head of the FCU during last September’s strike. In the Real Estate Tax Collectors’ strike, the workers elected a “Higher Committee for the Strike” that wasn’t composed of the union members, and the latter were excluded from negotiations… Spontaneous leaders (those referred to as “the representatives of the workers”) are appearing in workplaces, and it’s the task of political dissidents who are organizing against the Mubarak’s dictatorship to start forging links with them as well as putting those leaders in touch with another to exchange experiences and start a real push from below for the much delayed project of launching parallel independent labor unions and destroy the corrupt, Mubarak-backed General Federation.
