Egypt’s ongoing labor strikes extend to white collar jobs: a “hopeful” sign?
In what was labeled as the largest wave of worker protests since the Second World War, more than 550 labor protests have taken place in Egypt in the last year, including doctors’ and university professors’ demands for salary increases last Sunday.
The medical syndicate in Cairo announced last Tuesday that the Ministry of Health did not raise the basic salary for doctors, but said it did agree to increase benefits and make reimbursements immediately available to all doctors.
“There used to be conditions placed on reimbursements for doctors who did their masters or PhDs and for doctors who caught infections on the job that made it impossible for them to cash,” said Dr. Saeed El Sayid, manager of the syndicate’s press center.
“A consultant doctor who takes on 12-hour night shifts gets LE 18 a day for their trouble,” said syndicate head Hamdi El-Sayed, in a TV interview on a local channel, “That’s not even half of what we pay people who clean our apartments six hours a week.”
Joel Beinin, a contributing editor of The Middle East Report and director of the Middle East studies program at the American University in Cairo (AUC), said that the occurrence of these strikes at the same time as demonstrations by political movements like Kefaya, shows the emergence of a protest culture in Egypt.
“This is one of the most hopeful signs for the future of democracy in Egypt,” he said.
The strikes also came at a time when the prices of many basic consumer products are sky-rocketing, making subsidized baladi bread a luxury and turning subsidized flour into a black market commodity.
Doctors had been protesting in front of the People’s Assembly since the beginning of March, calling for a basic salary of at least LE 1,000. The current basic salary of Egyptian doctors ranges from LE. 250 to L.E. 400 per month.
The syndicate had announced a strike on March 15, in which no doctor would see a patient for two hours, but called it off at the last minute after Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif announced that a doctors’ strike would result in legal retaliation, said El Sayid.
Nazif said on a radio show last week that public sector strikes are prohibited by law.
Meanwhile, university professors throughout Egypt also went on strike last Sunday, including some 200 professors from Cairo University. They demanded changes in the pay system for professors, which has not been changed since 1972.
According to Mohamed Yehya, a fifth year student at Ain Shams medical school, the strike lasted all day Sunday, with some professors missing half their lectures and others missing all of them. “We [students] knew in advance about the strike, so it wasn’t an inconvenience.”
Youssef Beshay, mechanical engeneering senior at AUC, whose father has worked as a public sector doctor for the past 17 years, believes that doctors and university professors needed to take this stance more than any other employees. “They spend the most on their education and their rewards are not proportional,” he said.
At press time, there was still no government response to the professors’ demands.
These white-collar strikes came after a similar wave of protests by textile workers in Mahala and tax collectors in Cairo during the last months of 2007. The Middle East Report, a US-based quarterly specialized in analyzing Middle East issues, registered 222 strikes, protests and sit-ins in 2006, all pushing for changes in economic conditions. The number more than doubled in 2007.
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