One of the leaders of the Mahalla strike, Kamal Fayoumi, talks about the workers’ demands in an interview on 17 July. Video transcript below We are now in Misr Spinning in Mahalla. We had our legitimate demands before the revolution. We hoped these demands would be met after the revolution. Unfortunately the Military Council made…
Over 20,000 workers at the Misr Spinning plant in Mahalla are on strike. Read more here. Video transcript below. Worker in white shirt: ‘We have four demands: an increase in bonuses, a bigger share of profits, an increase in the retirement bonus from two and a half months’. Woman worker: ‘The first thing he does…
Around 23,000 workers at Misr Spinning in the industrial town of Mahalla al-Kubra in the Egyptian delta began indefinite strike action on 15 July. Over three thousand workers stayed overnight in the factory. The workers are demanding a share of the company’s profits for the past twelve months and the resignation of General Fouad Abd-al-Alim…
Calls for civil disobedience and a general strike on 11 February are gaining momentum across Egypt in the wake of the massacre of football supporters in Port Said. The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions and the Egyptian Democratic Labour Congress, which between them claim a membership of around 2 million workers in affiliated unions…
Demonstrations again filled Egypt’s streets on 27 January 2012, in a show of anger against the ruling military council. Enormous protests on 25 January filled Tahrir Square and cities across Egypt, dominated by chants for the end of military rule. Groups of workers have been prominent in the streets, with dozens of factories announcing before…
One year ago in Tunisia workers were playing a vital role in the protests sweeping the country against the Ben Ali regime. “The trade unions’ role is one of the most striking aspects of the December protests”, wrote the Tunisia expert Christopher Alexander in the magazine Foreign Policy. On the 7th January thousands of lawyers…
A national strike by Social Security workers took place in Tunisia on December 8th, with workers from the National Medical Care, Retirement and Social Security funds taking part. The workers were demanding that the government covers their social security provision, a benefit they enjoyed prior to 1990. The striking workers held sit-ins at government offices…
Shops, markets, schools, transport services and factories were all closed in the first stages of a general strike against the Assad government in Syria. The ‘Dignity Strike’ began on December 12th and activists hope it will intensify up until the end of December, bringing in more groups of workers as well as university students. The…
Workers in five oil and soap companies in the Delta towns of Damietta, Mansoura, Zagazig were set to strike on 15 December. Mohammed Abd-al-Rahman, a workers’ leader in the Sandub Oil Factory said that the dispute dated from the beginning of the revolution, when workers raised a demand for a 50% raise in their bonuses.…
A letter from the Revolutionary Association of Textile Workers to the revolutionaries on the barricades in Tahrir Square, Alexandria and Suez Original Arabic here 29 November 2011 Eleven days behind the barricades in the squares of Egypt is proof that the revolutionaries have reclaimed revolutionary legitimacy in seventeen provinces. Yet although the revolutionaries have offered…
MENA Solidarity Network 