This is how our “revolutionary” government negotiates with strikers. In the video below, General Ahmad Badr, the deputy governor of Alexandria, is threatening a striking teachers’ delegation in his office with a gun before kicking them out.
Tag: strikes
Minimum wage reduced to LE684 in new state budget
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.
Labor protests intensify during first half of 2011
Via the Daily News Egypt:
During the first half of 2011, there have been 338 sit-ins, 158 strikes, 259 demonstrations and 161 protests by workers, all demanding better working conditions, according to a report by a human rights group.
Awlad Al-Ard Association for Human Rights compiled and analyzed the activities of workers during the first half of 2011, finding that 11,077 workers have been terminated from their jobs while 22 were arrested and referred to military or civil courts.
Twelve workers have committed suicide because they could not endure the hardships of their conditions, the report said.
In a section titled “Workers and the Revolution,” the report stated that ever since the privatization policies of 2004 and up until the January 25 Revolution, there have been thousands of demonstrations by workers along with numerous detentions and jail sentences.
In the last four years, more than 300,000 workers in Egypt lost their jobs.
More than 51 percent of demonstrations, strikes, protests and sit-ins in the first half of 2011 happened in the weeks before the end of February, amid an 18-day uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11.
More resources could be found in the Egyptian workers Diigo group.