On Labor Day: Clouds of Social Rage Gather to Confront Impoverishment and Starvation

Analysis by the Revolutionary Socialists

A thousand salutes to Shady, Abdel Fattah, and Zakaria.

With the strike weapon at the forefront, 100% of labor protests have been driven by wage demands.
Despite the ruling class sparing no effort to suffocate the public sphere, intimidate political and social leaders, and tighten its grip on the media, we have documented 56 labor, professional, and social protests during the first four months of this year.

This number—disproportionately low given the severity of impoverishment and the assault on workers’ rights—can be attributed, alongside the state’s security chokehold, to the crippling economic crisis. This crisis has forced workers to hesitate before leaping into the unknown while stripping them of confidence in their ability to win their demands.

Raising wages stood at the top of blue-collar workers’ demands, at 100%, driven by a dramatic rise in the cost of living and the ongoing failure of business owners to implement the minimum wage, even before the recent increase to EGP 7,000.

Data from the Annual Wage Bulletin issued by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics reveals that real wages in Egypt rose by nearly 40% during the revolutionary wave from 2010 to 2013, thanks to the workers’ relentless struggle. However, during the counter-revolutionary period between 2014 and 2017, workers lost around 22% of the real value of their wages.

Between 2017 and 2019, real wages grew by no more than 6%, and from 2020 to 2021, increases across both public and private sectors didn’t exceed 1%. In the most recent phase, the average real wage in the private sector dropped by 15%, mainly due to the expansion expandingetin’s coverage to include workers in small enterprises, whose wages are considerably lower than those in larger businesses.

The strike by workers at Al-Amir Ceramics on the 10th of Ramadan City is a blatant example of the evasion of responsibility by powerful business elites and the collusion of state institutions. The workers launched their strike at the beginning of February, demanding the enforcement of the then-applicable minimum wage of EGP 6,000. During the strike, the National Wages Council issued a new decree raising the minimum wage to EGP 7,000, effective March, with no exceptions and binding on all employers.

Immediately, the striking workers demanded that the new minimum wage be implemented. The employer filed a police complaint against ten workers, accusing them of inciting the strike. The regime’s security forces swiftly arrested them, and the employer conditioned his withdrawal of the report on ending the strike. The workers, refusing to resume work without the release of their detained colleagues, were forced to yield.
Nevertheless—and perhaps because of—the widespread violations faced by private sector workers, protests in the private sector exceeded those in the public, government, and state-owned sectors combined, with private sector protests alone accounting for approximately 60%, followed by the state-owned enterprise sector.
According to the 2023 Wages and Employment Bulletin issued by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, the average monthly wage in the public/state-owned enterprise sector was EGP 12,401, compared to only EGP 4,675 in the private sector. Meanwhile, public/state-owned enterprise workers averaged 185 working hours per month, compared to 206 hours for private sector workers.

A comparison with the first four months of 2023 reveals a clear upward trend in worker protests: 41 protests were recorded last year, compared to 56 this year.

The sharp increase in strikes is more striking even though existing laws criminalize them. In the first four months of this year alone, 14 strikes were recorded, up from just 4 in the same period last year.
This shift may be attributed to two key factors:
1. The severe deterioration in the living conditions of wage workers, leaving them, as the saying goes, with their backs to the wall.

2. The government’s public decisions to raise the minimum wage, which it promotes and urges the private sector—at least through the media—to adhere to, giving workers a modest confidence to push for their rights.
For the second consecutive year, workers in utilities, construction, woodworking, and the textile industries have led labor protests—sectors marked by significantly low wages. As in the previous year, Greater Cairo (Cairo, Giza, and Qalyubia) was at the forefront of protest activity, recording 29 incidents over the past four months. In contrast, key industrial hubs such as Suez saw a decline in protest activity, with only two demonstrations reported—an issue that warrants further investigation.

We also observed that workers increasingly resorted to litigation and filing official complaints as relatively safe forms of protest under the prevailing repressive security environment.
On the community front, we documented ten protests by residents resisting the encroachment of the executive authority and its attempts to evict them from their homes and land in favor of wealthy Egyptian and Arab investors. For the eighth year in a row, the residents of Al-Warraq Island have staged a remarkable resistance against Gulf-backed land takeovers. On April 12, police forces stormed the island in a fresh escalation, targeting residents determined to defend their rights to their land and homes. The assault lasted for hours and was directly supervised by the director of the Giza Investigation Bureau. According to live broadcasts shared by residents, the police fired tear gas, birdshot, and live ammunition before reinforcements stormed homes, resulting in injuries to 50 residents and the arrest of approximately 11 others, as reported by the Al-Warraq Island Facebook page.

There has also been a noticeable resurgence in professional (white-collar) protests—especially in support of Gaza—compared to the early months of 2024. The first months of this year witnessed nine protests in front of the Lawyers’ and Journalists’ Syndicates, compared to just three during the same period last year. The Lawyers’ Syndicate also mobilized against the commodification of the legal profession, and the increase increased. Notably, these protests evolved into a collective refusal to pay fees, spreading to all governorates and echoing fierce slogans against the deteriorating living conditions and the unilateral decisions made by judicial authorities regarding the rights of lawyers and citizens.
This is a professional struggle and a broader battle to ensure citizens’ right to affordable and equitable access to justice, free from illegal financial burdens.

These protests have not come without cost. Striking workers have faced a full-scale class war as the ruling elite deployed its security apparatus and laws favoring big business. A stark example is the suppression of the strike at T&C Garments in Obour City, where around 6,000 workers—men and women—demanded a 50% wage increase to catch up with the minimum wage. Police forces arrested nine workers from their homes, referred them to the Public Prosecution, and held them in detention. After their release, they were suspended and later dismissed. The company owner accused external parties of inciting the workers via social media and threatened to exit the industry if the authorities did not intervene.

Importantly, the company is not in financial distress. Its exports reached $120 million in 2023 and, according to a statement by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, are expected to grow to $155 million in 2024. The same statement noted that the factory produces 60,000 garments daily—up from 900 per production line three years ago to 2,500 today—an increase achieved by intensifying pressure on workers.
In pursuit of profit—even when tainted by Palestinian blood—the company operates under the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) agreement, which requires that 10.5% of the content in Egyptian products be of Israeli origin to qualify for access to the U.S. market.

For the second year in a row, female workers at the National Company for Greenhouses—affiliated with the Armed Forces—rose up shoulder to shoulder with their male colleagues. Defying the anti-assembly law after their financial demands were ignored, they protested in front of their company in Abu Hammad, Sharqia. Security forces surrounded them and arrested 39 workers, including people with disabilities. The Public Prosecution released them after two weeks in detention.

Last year, the Wabaryat Samannoud Company witnessed a prolonged strike led by female workers. Security forces arrested three women from their homes, and the campaign of retaliation against the company continues.
Despite the security clampdown, legal restrictions on workers’ ability to challenge the sale of their institutions, the weakness of the left, and the absence of independent union organizations, workers continue to resist liquidation and privatization. These efforts have accelerated following the formation of the new Madbouly government in the summer of 2024.

The crisis-ridden capitalist regime has increasingly come to rely on two strategies to escape its economic predicament: borrowing—and more borrowing—and selling… selling off all of the country’s assets without exception, in service of repaying debt installments.

Hence, the importance of monitoring and documenting workers’ struggles to halt the course of privatization and looting becomes evident. This was demonstrated by the success of the workers of Al-Nasr Foundries in the village of Tannash, Giza Governorate, in December of last year, in restarting their company after a two-year shutdown—achieved after they gave up the value of their shares to repay the company’s debt. Meanwhile, thousands of workers from the Eastern Tobacco Company staged a protest on Friday, February 21, in front of the company’s social club on Khatem El Morsaleen Street in the Omraneya district during the extraordinary general assembly meeting of the Workers’ Shareholders Union to vote on the sale of their share in the company’s stock. The workers chanted, “We won’t vote, we won’t sell… Our children’s rights will not be lost.”
The workers refused to vote in favor of the sale, objecting to what they perceived as a conspiracy to strip them of their ownership in the company’s shares at an undervalued price. They demanded a vote of no confidence in the Union’s board of directors, which had submitted the sale proposal, and also called for their shares to be listed on the stock exchange so they could manage and freely trade their shares.

In all its military and civilian wings, the ruling capitalist class was not content with merely exploiting workers’ labor. According to World Bank estimates, the wage share of the gross national product dropped to 25 percent from 40 percent. Moreover, legislation was passed to allow for even greater exploitation of labor.
Just days before Labor Day, a parliament dominated by intelligence agencies passed the new labor law. This law reduces bonuses, makes temporary work the norm, allows for the dismissal of workers, restricts the right to strike, and legalizes labor supply companies (i.e., manpower contractors).

However, due to international pressure and developments in the labor market, the law extended its scope for the first time to include digital platform workers, thus introducing a new labor struggle: how to organize these workers into unions and engage in collective bargaining, given the fragmented and isolated nature of their work.

The law also prohibits forced labor and grants female workers in the private sector the same number of maternity leaves as those in the public sector. This paves the way for further struggles to confront violence and harassment in the workplace and to fight wage discrimination between men and women. According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, in 2023, the average salary for men in both the public/business sector and the private sector was EGP 5,128, while the average salary for women in the same sectors was EGP 4,439.

The capitalist government continued its campaign against independent unions by placing obstacles to forming new ones in favor of the yellow, state-backed federation. Nonetheless, the efforts that uphold the banner of union freedom remain alive. The ongoing struggle of the Suez Canal Authority Clubs Union against attempts by the administration, in collusion with state apparatuses, to dissolve it deserves admiration, praise, and solidarity—especially in the lawsuit it has filed against the administration’s arbitrary decisions.
The effort to resist the suppression of workers’ struggles for independent organization is a battle for all leftist and democratic forces seeking change. Looking the other way only entrenches the current authoritarianism and social injustice.

As we celebrate International Workers’ Day, we must salute the vanguard of the working class fighting for Palestine and democracy, who remain behind the bars of the class enemy: Shady Mohamed, Ahmed Abdel Fattah, and Sameh Zakaria.

A salute to the workers of Al-Amir Ceramics Company, who refused to return to work until their detained colleagues were released. The families of dismissed and imprisoned workers must not be left alone to face life’s burdens. We must revive the combative legacy of the labor movement through solidarity, organizing strike funds, and forming shop-floor delegate committees.

Salute to the leaders of the working class who were dismissed from T&C Company and, before them, from Leoni Wiring Systems, and to the dismissed labor leader from the Samannoud Weaving Company, Hesham El-Banna, and the unionist at the Adult Education Authority, Ahmed Abdel Mardey. A salute to every worker subjected to persecution.

Let us pledge to continue our struggle alongside the broader social movement, extending our hands to political and human rights forces in support of the labor struggle, to defend workers’ rights to fair wages, independent union organizations, and a political party that represents their aspirations for liberation from exploitation, poverty, tyranny, and colonialism.