Egyptian Workers Occupy Plants

Press Release

Sit-in of the Airplane and Coke Factories Workers

The Center for Trade Union and workers Services “CTUWS”, 28 February 2011:

Over 1500 workers of the Airplane factory (of the Arab Industrialization Authority) continued their sit-in at the company’s premises in Helwan for the second day successively. The sit-in started at 3 pm yesterday demanding wage increase and restructure, increasing the incentives from 15 to 30 days similar to the other factories of the Arab Industrialization Authority, disbursing the meal allowance which the company had promised but did not fulfill its promise, disbursing allowance for special assignments and doing without the consultants who charge hundreds of thousands of Egyptian pounds every month without any noticeable gain.

In the same context, workers of the Coke Factory of Tibeen started a strike calling for the resignation of the company’s chairman, the accountability of those responsible for deterioration of the company’s conditions, improving the workers work conditions and disbursing the overdue profits and incentives which the company has ignored in spite of the profits which the company has realized. The Coke workers gathered in front of the company premises calling for increasing their wages, providing temporary workers with labour contracts and disbursing incentives for ‘exportation’. They cheered against corruption, saluted the revolution of the youth and called upon the officials to intervene in order to put an end to the unfair treatment of the management, to improve their income and to implement the promotion movement in the company. They shouted: “ where is the media? We are the unfairly treated Coke workers. We demand our rights”. They also called for investigation in the financial and administrative violations which the Central Accounting Authority had discovered earlier. They criticized transferring all the company’s profits to the holding company without concern to the improvement of the life conditions of the workers who achieved these profits in spite of their bad work conditions.

The workers

They presented their written demands to one of the army leaders. Their demands came as follows: to hold the corrupt managers of the company responsible for their deeds, to dismantle the third battery and restructure it as soon as possible in order to add to the company’s productivity, to operate the Ammonia Section of the Fertilizers Factory which was stopped in order to save the millions of pounds used to import ammonia from abroad, to cover the workers deficit in the production sections, not to assign work for the contractor’s loaders and vehicles and to rely on the company’s loaders, to disperse the end of service compensation as stipulated by Article 72 of the executive regulations, to amend the wages table as from1/3/2011, to increase the monthly incentives by 30%, to improve the monthly ration (3 liter of edible oil and ¼ kg tea), to make labour contracts for all the workers, to employ the sons of the workers, to terminate the contracts of all who are 60 years old or more and to activate the idled articles of the company’s regulations according to Law No. 12 for 2003.