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.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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