Tag: suicide
Man commits suicide after stocks plunge
From AFP:
An Egyptian man committed suicide on Monday after losing his savings which he had invested in the plummeting stock market, a security official said.
The 56-year-old man was found hanging by a rope in his Cairo home by his children, the official said.
He had saved money working in Kuwait before returning to Egypt and investing in Egyptian stocks, whose key values have more than halved in recent months amid the global financial crisis.
His children reported he had threatened to kill himself because of his financial troubles, the official said.
The World Health Organization warned last week that the global economic crisis is likely to cause an upsurge in suicides and mental illness as people struggle to cope with losing their homes or livelihoods.
The warning came after a 45-year-old business school graduate in Los Angeles shot dead five members of his family before killing himself, blaming the economic situation in a suicide letter addressed to the police.
Egyptian Workers and Social Resistance: 368 industrial actions in 6 months
The 2nd issue of “Workers and Social Resistance,” produced by the Workers’ Coordination Committee is now available online.
The report documents 368 industrial actions (There’s a typo in the original report, as the figure is written 386 instead), in the private and public sectors as well as the civil servants (which the report puts them in a different category than the public sector), from January to July 2007: 100 Sit-ins, 109 Strikes, 33 Demonstrations, 126 illegal assemblies accompanied by a short-period work stoppages.
[368 in only six months. Remember the Land Center for Human Rights documented 222 industrial actions all throughout 2006, so we are way already beyond that for this year.]
But more troubling, the report stated that 26 workers committed suicide, while 75,000 lost their jobs. Also among the 129 cases of work-related injuries the report documented, 84 died. [No wonder in most of the strikes I covered last spring, one of the demands that was universally raised by strikers in different sectors had been the presence of an ambulance car inside the factory compounds to guarantee the quick transfer of any injured workers to the hospitals.]
From the 368 industrial actions, the report states that they are divided among the following: 121 in the Public Sector, 141 among Civil Servants, while 106 in the private sector.