sadat archives — Page 5 of 8

The Bread Uprising that shook Egypt’s urban towns on the 18th and 19th of January, 1977, is always wrongly treated in the mainstream media as an “Uprising of thieves,” quoting President Sadat’s description of the events, with emphasis on the violence and the looting that accompanied the people’s uprising.

After Mahalla triggered the Winter of Labor Discontent, and once more pushed for a Hot Industrial Autumn, some on the Left today cannot help but drawing parallels between the current situation and the time leading to Jan ’77.

The preconditions that preceded Bread Intifada will be the subject of a future posting; the events were the climax of a rising social movement from February 1968, that culminated in the two-day uprising that was to be crushed by Sadat’s army in 1977.

In this posting, however, I’ll focus on 1976 onwards, and the organized working class movement vs. the rioting which was mainly conducted by the urban poor. The resources used are parts of the MA Thesis I wrote eight years ago.

January 1977 Bread Uprising (Photo from Al-Ahram Archives)

I’m receiving news that 3000 public transportation workers are on strike in Cairo. They include bus drivers, ticket collectors, maintenance workers in the stations of Nasr and Fateh, located in my neighborhood Nasr City, east of the capital.

I’ll post more details soon.

UPDATE: The Sixth District of Nasr City has turned into a military zone, with heavy police deployments. The strikers are under siege. No photographers or reporters are allowed in. The strikers number something between 2000 and 3000. The workers are demanding raising their ridiculously low salaries (you can work for 10 years, and your basic salary won’t exceed LE500). They are also demanding a corruption investigation into their housing society, especially with the existence of 26 emergency cases of workers without houses. The strikers are also demanding equality in food allowances. While the driver receives LE100 a month, the ticket collector receives LE55, and the maintenance worker gets LE20!! The strikers are demanding the food allowance to be raised more than LE100 and to be paid equally to everybody.

The strikers, in addition, want an increase in their percentage of the bus tickets sales. The workers get 2.5% of the value of the sold ticket. They want to increase this to 10%.

The workers are also protesting their treatment when they get transferred from their jobs due to medical reasons. The government cuts down their bonuses from LE300 to LE70!

The workers have occupied the two stations (Nasr and Fateh), which have 149 buses. The government managed only to bring out less than 40. The rest are under the workers’ control.

The public transportation workers in Sawwah and Giza have not joined the strike yet, but my sources say they are following closely what’s happening in Nasr City, and there’s a possibility the industrial action will spread.

Could that be another 1976? Back then, public transportation workers launched a national strike, one day after Sadat was declared president by 99% in a sham referendum. This paved the road to the January 1977 Bread Intifada.

UPDATE: It’s 10pm now. The strike continues in Nasr and Fateh stations… but no information is available yet if anything happened in the other stations in Cairo or Giza. I was told the chief of the Public Transport Authorities arrived in person to negotiate with the strikers. He asked them to suspend the strike, and promised their demads will be met in July with the start of the new financial year. The workers refused, and are still sitting in.

Tag: sadat

18 & 19 January 1977: The Lost Revolution

خطاب السادات الأخير

Public transportation workers on strike إضراب عمال النقل العام