DNE: Wage concessions end Mahalla strike, leave political demands unaddressed

Wage concessions end Mahalla strike, leave political demands unaddressed

By Liam Stack
First Published: September 30, 2007

MAHALLA EL KOBRA: The Ghazl El Mahalla workers’ movement ended its week-long strike early on Saturday morning after negotiations with management and the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation yielded concessions on wages and working conditions, although the strike’s political demands have not been met.

The strike, which united more than 27,000 employees of Egypt’s largest public sector plant and brought production at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company to a stand-still, was the second to grip the site in the dusty industrial city of Mahalla in less than a year.

The most recent protest began last week, when workers said that management and the ETUF had reneged on a series of promises they made after last December’s strike.

At that time, workers were told that conditions at the factory would improve and that they could participate in a profit-sharing deal that would pay them bonuses equal to 150 days pay if the company turned a profit of more than LE 60 million.

At the end of the fiscal year in July, workers in Mahalla complained that the firm posted profits of more than LE 200 million, but that they had only received a bonus of 20-days pay.

Combined with the abysmal conditions in the plant and what workers call widespread corruption, the broken profit sharing promise ignited a new wave of frustration and militancy among the company’s employees.

“The people on strike are the factory workers, the office workers, the engineers, the people who work in the management building — everyone except for the board of directors,” one protestor, who was afraid to give his name, told Daily News Egypt during the strike.

“We are here because [Minister of Manpower] Aisha Abdel Hady and [Minister of Investment] Mahmoud Mohieddin made promises to us in the last strike but now they say they didn’t promise us anything,” he added. “We are here because they are liars.”

But after one week of high-profile strikes, dubbed “The Mahalla Intifada” by some independent Arabic-language dailies, the management of the firm has renewed its rhetorical commitment to many of those promises.

According to Sayed Habib, a leader of the Mahalla Workers Movement, the management has agreed to pay the workers an immediate bonus equal to 70-days pay and additionally will pay a later bonus of 60-days wages after a meeting of the firm’s administrative general assembly.

They have not agreed to the principle of profit sharing in the future, although they say that future bonuses will be larger than in the past and tied to an annual salary increase of 7 percent. Management has also agreed to consider the days of the sit-in a paid vacation, and says that no worker will be penalized for their participation in the action.

For its part, the government has promised to form a committee in the Ministry of Investment to negotiate hazard pay for workers whose jobs expose them to dangerous conditions or health risks, as many positions in the textile mill do. They will also increase each worker’s clothing allowance.

“We are happy with the deal that was reached,” said Habib. “It is a good deal for us.”

While the concessions made by management are a welcome boon to the lives of some of Egypt’s poorest workers, Saturday’s pre-dawn agreement addressed none of the political demands made by the increasingly politicized Mahalla movement.

After last December’s strike, in which the workers’ local union sided with management against them, the workers’ movement collected over 14,000 signatures calling for the impeachment of local union officials and the dissolution of the ETUF.

They say the national union body is an arm of the state, and cares more about keeping the Mubarak regime in power than it does about defending the interests of the working class.

But the ETUF has consistently ignored the worker’s petitions, and their demands for reform have never been the subject of any negotiation between workers and the state.

Habib says that the movement is “still in discussions” with management about forming a free union, but that in the meantime they are considering other options for exerting pressure on their bosses from within the existing union framework.

“We are thinking about forming a worker’s collective at the factory,” he says. “We hope that a collective would be able to put pressure on the union committee here to listen to us and fight harder for demands we make.”