From the BBC…
Hidden away in a concrete loading bay around the side of a major Cairo postal office, about 100 workers in their 20s and 30s gather among a forest of placards.
Following a trail blazed by a succession of Egyptian textile workers, concrete makers, train drivers and others in recent months, they say they will stay put until their demands are met.
In a country where political opposition is heavily stifled and largely left to a small intellectual elite, the current series of strikes, sit-ins and protests is an unusually broad-based protest among a population normally associated with political indifference.
Joel Beinin, head of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo, says proponents of democratic reform in Egypt should be “more excited” by the wave of labor unrest than they were by the emergence of anti-government street protests by the opposition Kifaya (Enough) group in 2005.
Underlying most of the strikes are demands for wage rises in an economy where it is not unusual even for professionals to hold down two jobs to feed their families.
But some strikes have taken on a political edge as workers protest against privatisations under President Hosni Mubarak’s sweeping economic reform programme.
And a few workers have begun calling for something Egypt has not had for decades – independent trade unions.
Strikes spread
Mohammad Attar is a textile worker in the Nile Delta town of Mahalla, and was an organizer in one of most successful strikes.
Some 20,000 workers downed tools and occupied their factory last December, inspiring a series of copycat strikes as their demands for an unpaid bonus promised to all laborers nationally were eventually met.
The father of three is in jubilant mood as we speak on the phone.
Recent threats to strike further have just earned him and his co-workers a raise – boosting his monthly salary of 320 Egyptian pounds (US$56) by 50 Egyptian pounds (US$9), with 7% annual increases promised.
He says his activities have resulted in several summonses from the security forces.
But, for the first time, he says he is not afraid: “I stand in front of them and we are equal. In fact we are even better than them – we are in the production sector but they are just in the service sector. We are the backbone of the national economy.”
Within four months of the Mahalla strike, workers at three other large textile factories and two cement factories had held stoppages and railway employees had briefly blockaded the Cairo-Alexandria train line backed by a go-slow by Cairo metro drivers.
And the sit-in by the postal workers, who are calling for fixed term contracts, is one among hundreds of other smaller-scale actions by workers ranging from rubbish collectors to bakers and poultry workers to Suez Canal employees which have also been reported in the Egyptian media.
