Al-Jazeera: Egyptians hold ‘Farewell Friday’
Egypt’s labor movement has been the sleeping giant of the past two weeks’ protests, and its involvement could amount to a real fillip for the antigovernment demonstrations. The workers bring experience at protests and organization to the youth-led protest movement, whose efforts to extract major concessions from Egypt’s government was beginning to stall as it entered its third week.
The Socialist Worker (US edition) has more on the influence of the organised labour in the protest movement:
THE DEMONSTRATORS in Tahrir also called on workers who began returning to their jobs all across the country over the weekend to begin striking and occupying factories–both public and private companies–and to walk out in mass demonstrations.
But the workers were already in action. On the morning of February 9, workers at the important KOK Chemical Factory in Helwan, which is a historically militant industrial suburb of Cairo, began a strike, followed by petroleum workers at Petrol Trade.
By the afternoon, the strike began to spread to different factories around the region and beyond. Two of the most important places are industrial centers in the Nile Delta–Kafr Zayat and Kafr al-Tawar. These are also historically militant textile industry towns that have given the regime a hard time for many years. Kafr al-Tawar is only half an hour outside of Alexandria, the country’s second-largest city.
The interesting thing is that in these strikes, the demands were to raise wages, but also the removal of the government-appointed CEOs of the companies–in many cases, of course, these CEOs are members of the National Democratic Party, the ruling party of the Mubarak regime.