Phone company workers strike in Egypt over bonuses: report

Oct 24, 2007, 13:38 GMT

Cairo - A group of more than 500 telephone company workers started a strike in the district of Ma'sara, in the southern suburbs of Cairo, in protest of delayed bonuses, media reports said Wednesday.

The workers should have received a bonuses equivalent to 90 days of work as promised by the company's administration, the independent al-Masri al-Yom newspaper reported. However, the company official who made the promise 'fled the company' last Monday, according to sources from the company's union committee.

Meanwhile, the workers vow to continue a sit-in in the company's yard until they get their bonuses.

Only last Sunday, 55,000 tax workers demonstrated in Cairo for similar demands. They vowed to stop collecting taxes until their demands were met.

The two strikes come on the heels of a series of other sit-ins and labour protests, which began last month with a week-long workers' strike of 27,000 Egyptian textile workers in the northern Gharbiya province.

Despite the limited gains of Gharbiya's striking workers, the hubbub that was caused by the textile workers and the extensive media coverage their cause received encouraged others to follow their lead. Strikes have become a front-page issue in many newspapers.

The Gharbiya strike also reportedly caused the textile company a 40-million-pound loss, and the government had to 'cave in' under the pressure, according to observers.

The ongoing strikes revived the memory of a 2006 crisis where protests popped up in several factories, and where labourers, encouraged by their colleagues, organized mass protests in both major plants and low-paid industries.