Tag: unions

Railway Union okays two of train drivers’ demands

Posted on By 3arabawy

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.

Syndicate membership isn’t for everyone

Posted on By 3arabawy

From the Daily News Egypt:

Last February Mervat Rashad, a journalist with Nahdet Misr newspaper, was attacked by a Wafd party member while she was at the party’s office seeking information for a story.
When she decided to file a complaint at the police station, she — not being a member of the Journalists’ Syndicate — was possibly subject to up to six months in jail for taking over a false vocation.
“Thousands of journalists could be legally accountable taking on a false vocation,” said Rashad.
Due to limited access to the Journalists’ Syndicate membership, many practicing journalists are working on an informal, illegal basis.
“It’s a disaster; a lot of young journalists — actually the building blocks of many newspapers — are not counted as journalists. … On the other side, half of those who have syndicate membership are technicians,” Sayed El-Turki, a journalist with Al-Dostour told Daily News Egypt.
Despite being a member in the syndicate, El-Turki joined non-members, forming a group called the Alliance of Young Journalists, to agitate for their right to join the syndicate.

Doctors' strike postponed

Posted on By 3arabawy

Less than one week after Mubarak’s PM Ahmad Nazif threatened doctors and civil servants planning strikes, the Doctors’ Syndicate board decided to back down and postpone indefinitely the two-hour strike that had been scheduled 15 March.

The doctors held a demonstration on the same day as the Syndicate board meeting was in process. This time, they didn’t enjoy the backing of the Syndicate.. Even Hamdi el-Sayyed, the syndicate head, neither stopped to talk nor sent any gestures to the protesters, as he was getting into the building. It’s clear the syndicate board is coming under huge pressure from the regime. But having postponed the strike doesn’t mean the tension within the ranks of the doctors is gone. The government will have to come up with a compromise that the Syndicate Board—led by the good ol’ Hamdi who’s VERY KEEN about solving this issue asap and not let it escalate—can secure the backing of the coming General Assembly on 21 March. The doctors have been demanding LE1000 as a minimum salary. Will the govt agree to that? I can hardly imagine.

“Doctors Without Rights,” a new front of mainly secular leftist doctors, is still not as strong in lobbying the Syndicate board as the Muslim Brothers. The latter have been playing a positive role in the current struggle in the syndicate, but we still have to see if they’ll take the fight till the end, or will their doctors agree to some compromise in the current context of continuous security crackdowns on the organization. From what activist sources in Cairo are saying, the current rebellion is not necessarily colored by any political force, though everyone from leftists, Arab Nationalists to Islamists are there and participating.

In a statement, Doctors Without Rights announced they were going ahead with a sit-in on 15 March at the Doctors’ Syndicate HQ in el-Qasr el-Eini St. The sit-in will continue to 21 March, the day when the Syndicate’s General Meeting should convene.

Nazif’s statements are not new, and I hope our doctors remember that. Virtually ALL OF THE WORKERS’ STRIKE OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS HAVE BEEN ILLEGAL. I mean all of them. Not a single one—according to 2003 Unified Labor Law, which imposed more draconian restrictions on the workers’ right to organize, unionize and strike—is legal.

Nazif’s claims about the tax collectors being the only “exception” to be allowed to strike although they are considered a “strategic” sector are horseshit. We all know the govt was forced to compromise and meet the strikers’ demands after a fascinating national coordination that included 55,000 of them and the public embarrassment they caused the regime by their camp in downtown Cairo. Also, workers in other sectors deemed “strategic” by the regime went on strike, like the case of the railway workers, underground metro drivers, maintenance workers and cashiers, the postal service workers, Public Transport drivers and hospital workers… These all fall under the “strategic” classification of the Mubarak’s regime. But the workers still went on strikes. Other sectors, also considered “strategic,” witnessed protests and sit-ins, but not necessarily strikes, like the Grain Mills, whose workers staged protests in spring 2007, and organized a demonstration in solidarity with the September 2007 Mahalla strike.

And finally, I leave you with these photos, taken by Sarah Carr, of the doctors’ protest that took place Sunday in front of syndicate.

UPDATE: I received a new statement from Doctors Without Rights, which you can download here.

The statement strongly condemned PM Nazif and the Doctors’ Syndicate’s board, openly accusing the latter of betraying the doctors. The statement also called on all doctors to send delegations from their hospitals to the sit-in to be organized on 15 March, instead of the strike, and is to last till 21 March, when the General Assembly convenes.

There will be daily protests, coupled with the sit-in, on the doorsteps of the syndicate from 3 to 5pm. The statement also included the blog address of the campaign, which you can check out here.