The Activist Guide to Flickr (Arabic) دليل المدون الناشط للتصوير وخدمة فلكر

طالع وساهم في نشر دليل التصوير وخدمة فليكر بالعربية…

Egyptian workers honor Freedom Flotilla martyrs

The current strike wave is not just about economic demands, but politics is also involved. The strike wave is also reshaping the consciousness of sections of the Egyptian working class.

You find a civil servant who was not involved politically, but suddenly joins a strike action over work conditions, and exhibits previously unknown (even to himself) organizing skills that elevates him to the strike leadership. Once the strike is suspended in victory, this civil servant together with his comrades goes ahead to build the country’s first independent trade union in half a century, and is taking an active role in political life, showing for all sorts of protests over democratic issues and helping spread the free union experience of the tax collectors to other workers in other sectors.

This is just one example. Another example could be seen above in the video, where workers from Tanta Flax, Amonsito and Mahalla denounce the Israeli deadly attack on the Gaza aid convoy. These workers started their fight over local grievances related their own specific factories over the past few years. But by time their consciousness have gone through transformation, helping some of them to look at the bigger picture, to start linking their factory grievances with the overall state policy, to start drawing parallels between the state’s policy towards them, with that of Israel vis a vis the Palestinians, and to start organizing, like in the video above, in support of the Palestinians while continuing fighting for their own specific demands…

I dislike it when someone tells me this strike wave is not political… This strike wave is changing the lives of those millions of workers taking part in it, and there lies the hope of changing the system…

Media Ethics 101 @AlMasryAlYoum_E

A memo that was followed by a resignation, handed in by Fatemah Farag, the chief editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm’s English Edition…

Dear Mr. Sherif Wadoud, Vice CEO,
CC: Mr Salah Diab, CEO

30 May, 2010

This is to inform you – on the record – that the English Edition of Al-Masry Al-Youm, which I have been privileged to establish and run during the past year and a half, has in recent weeks been increasingly besieged by incoherent, slapdash and institutionally irregular practices and interventions in editorial operations by the organization’s business management.

To make matters worse, the chain of responsibility and accountability within the organization has become increasingly random and blurred.

This has created an untenable situation.

Let me first set down a few reminders:

1. In October 2008 I was asked by Mr. Salah Diab to draw up a blue print for the development of an English Edition for Al-Masry Al-Youm.
2. Al-Masry Al-Youm hired me at the end of December 2008 in the capacity of Chief Editor for an English Edition, to be built from scratch and in accordance with my blue print.
3. Since that date, and in spite of the serious and continuing technical shortcomings that had beset the project, I succeeded in meeting not only my initial project objectives, but moved forward to develop an even more ambitious vision for the development of the English Edition of Al-Masry Al-Youm.
4. In the past few weeks alone we have been breaking our traffic records, moving clearly beyond the 6000/day mark; the site is increasingly visible on Google News as well as on the radar sites of major think tanks and specialized interest groups.
5. Towards the building of a sound English Edition for this organization I have put together – again from scratch – a unique, highly qualified and dedicated team of professional journalists and editors who have worked organically to develop it into the success that it is today.

Let me remind you as well that in so far as I report to you, ex officio, I have submitted to you regular status reports on the development and progress of the English Edition, the latest of which was on 9 May and to which you did not respond. The last you responded to was that of December and you gave very positive feedback at the time.

Two weeks ago, I wrote requesting a meeting with you to discuss a number of irregular interventions from the business side of the Al-Masry Al-Youm management, which request you have yet to respond to.

As such I feel obliged to set down what I believe are the bottom-line requisites for the proper running of a newsroom in the professional manner worthy of Al-Masry Al-Youm:

1. Management simply does not interfere in editorial content on a day by day, link by link, story by story basis – ever, anywhere.
2. Management relationship with Editorial is conducted via the Editor-in-Chief, and in accordance with a clear, formal and institutionally delineated chain of command.
3. Management relationship with Editorial is conducted in a professional, business-like manner and takes the form of regular meetings; feedback to reports submitted by Editorial, engagement with Editorial in strategic discussion and planning; coordination with Editorial in promoting the financial viability and sustainability of the venture, etc.
4. Management does not intervene in editorial operations by attempting to create an alternative chain of editorial command, bypassing the Editor-in-Chief; neither does it do so in a haphazard, informal and institutionally irregular manner.
5. Neither does proper and professional management include trying to avoid facing up to its own shortcomings and slapdash decisions of by “passing the buck” onto Editorial.
6. Decorum and a minimum degree of courtesy is, needless to say, a necessary requisite for proper and professionally conducted interaction between management and editorial. Garrulous, curt and even threatening communication is not – especially when it is also incoherent and thoughtless.
7. People get paid what they signed on to, and in accordance with what management committed itself to offering. I was never paid what was stipulated in the Letter of Agreement you signed with me. Further, in December you committed to raising my current salary by 15 per cent, effective January. To date, and in spite of several text messages and email reminders from me, this is yet to be put into effect.

Fatemah Farag
Chief Editor
English Edition
Al-Masry Al-Youm

Editor’s resignation from @AlMasryAlYoum_E

Below is the resignation of my colleague Lina El Wardani…

Dear Sherif Wadoud
This is to inform you – as a leading member of the core editorial team of the English Edition – that the unprofessional and haphazard intervention of management has resulted in an untenable work environment at the English Edition of Al-Masry Al-Youm.
As you are well aware:
1) In February 2009 I was hired by Ms. Fatemah Farag, chief editor of the English Edition, as a news editor and the first employee of the English Edition;
2) In June 2009 I was promoted to be a managing editor which has meant working 6 and 7 day weeks, all hours of the day, using my personal phone, internet and computer at my own expense since Al-Masry never provided these basic facilities;
3) Together with the chief editor gathered the highest calibers in the field of bilingual reporters in the Middle East;
4) Worked with the core editorial team to make this the fastest growing and most successful local English-language news site in the Middle East as testified to by our linking profile and growing traffic;
In spite of my keen awareness of our success and my active role in building this project, keeping the pride and joy of the job is becoming a daily challenge.
All the ethical and professional codes are being breached. The following are just a few examples:
1- During all meetings with management the importance of integration with the Arabic Edition is asserted. However, I was kicked out of a liaison meeting by the chief editor of the Arabic newspaper who went on to insulted me in public To date, I have not been offered an apology neither by the chief editor, nor by the management;
2- Management interferes in daily editorial matters. Having worked at the BBC, MBC , DPA, Al Jazeera, UN press office, and other international and local news rooms, this is a practice I have never encountered. I find it unacceptable.
3- The Project Manager is always sending me orders, bypassing my editor, which puts me in an awkward, and simply wrong, situation;
4- In the weekly meetings with management, the benchmarks change so often that it becomes impossible to discern what the actual priorities are and what the relevance of project owner directives are; should they be relevant at all. The message of months of interaction is that management does not know what it wants or what this project is about.
5- Since the launch of the project I have worked weekends, shifting with my co managing editor Hossam el-Hamalawy, and I have yet to be compensated for these days.
6- I have never worked in an organization where my efforts were so unrecognized (I have not received a bonus or raise in my 15 months here), where I faced such breaches in professional conduct, where the institution instead of supporting my rights goes out of its way to deny me of these rights.
In sum, I am rather disheartened for having put so much effort and passion in a project which management appropriates it as a personal belonging, constantly disregarding and mistrusting the intellectual capabilities of its editorial team.
I hereby hand over my duties to the management and the senior editorial staff, wishing them all the best.
Regards,
Lina El Wardani
31 May 2010

My resignation could be read here…

My resignation from @AlMasryAlYoum_E

From: Hossam el-Hamalawy, Managing Editor of the Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition
To: Sherif Wadoud, vice CEO, Al-Masry Al-Youm
Cc: Salah Diab, CEO, Al-Masry Al-Youm
Subject: Resignation Letter
Date: 31 May, 2010

After serving for a year as a member of the founding editorial team of the Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition, kindly accept my resignation included in this letter.

- I’m disappointed by the continuous managerial interventions in the editorial process, which go into minute details so as to what video should go along with what article, which words to hyperlink, what photos to use–all issues that should be left for the judgment of the professional editorial team hired by the Al-Masry.

- There is even no clear mechanism for those interventions. The project owner, Ms Kismet ElSayed, has repeatedly contacted editors and journalists with instructions without notifying the editor in chief. On another occasion, the management went ahead and censored an article1 on torture of detainees, on 5 April, without notifying the managing editors on duty. Upon protest from the editors, the article was sent to the Al-Masry’s legal office for review. We never heard back from them as of time of writing.

- The managerial interventions do not always stem from a qualified position and disregard the expertise of the editorial team. For example, the team was asked by the project owner to “copy and paste from Al-Jazeera’s website,” as one way to increase the rate of updates on our Al-Masry portal. The request was refused by the editors for obvious professional reasons, only to hear the project owner insisting Al-Jazeera was a “news wire service, similar to AP and Reuters [sic]”

- Over all there is lack of clarity regarding the benchmarks according to which the team should be assessed. Those keep changing, sometimes even on a weekly basis by the management.

- We are still in a state of disbelief re the management’s failure to instate a clear position for the English Edition within the Al-Masry institution which regulates its relationship vis a vis the Arabic newspaper, whose editor, Magdi el-Gallad, repeatedly directed insults publicly against members of our team, expelled them from meetings, and literally sabotaged our work for months by stalling the publishing of articles written by EE journalists. An apology was requested by the team for those insults and unprofessional attitude–an apology that never came and left everyone wondering whether that was a sign the management was sanctioning el-Gallad’s behavior.

- The management has failed to secure the publicity and marketing needed for the English Edition. Not a single ad in the newspaper was published, despite the repeated requests by the EE editors. Our requests for information from the management about the number of subscribers to our services, like SMS and the ODP, were not answered, leaving us uninformed about the target audience and our benchmarks for success.

- The office working conditions are depressive in terms of light, ventilation, and equipment. Our repeated requests to the Human Resources department, for example, about the needed computers and chairs rarely meet response. How are we supposed to encourage our journalists to work from the office, rather from home, if the office is by no means suitable?

- I am deeply frustrated by the unclear system of attendance the Human Resources department is adopting, which has left me uncompensated for the weekends during which I worked, and the long working hours from home following office hours, which sometimes went on till 5 AM.

- The money owed to contributors is always problematic to process with the finance department, leaving some freelance contributors unpaid since last year. This is negatively affecting both our team’s work and reputation.

I do not think it’s become feasible to continue working under those conditions. I’m hereby handing over my responsibilities to management, wishing the remaining team members all the luck.

—–
1 http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/diaries-torture

Police cracks down on textile workers in downtown Cairo فيديو: الشرطة تفض اعتصام عمال أمونسيتو

Security cracks down on Amonsito textile workers, Sunday 23 May, in front of the parliament…

Listen to the worker speaking at 2:33, drawing parallels between the state crackdown on the Amonsito workers to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

ElBaradei

When you find a former diplomat who loyally served Sadat and Mubarak, suddenly shifting sides and joining the opposition, then this is more telling about the state of the regime than it is telling about this former loyal servant. The regime’s ship is sinking.

‘Don’t be afraid’

During the protest I heard this worker, talking to someone on the phone. I only managed to record the last bit in the conversation: “… have to have courage, awareness, and forget about fear. Listen to those respectable people, and make others listen to them too.”

Moments earlier, the worker, Ramadan Mohamed Morsi was telling his colleague on the other end of the line: “Listen to the chants… Tell the people back home not to be afraid. We are demonstrating here in Cairo and no one touched us.”

Hundreds of workers showed up for this protest on Saturday, not hundreds of thousands. But it was a very diverse crowd, in terms of sectors and geographical location. Each of those workers will go back home after the protest to tell their colleagues the same message Morsi had for his colleague: “Don’t be afraid. We demonstrated. We felt empowered. You can do it too.” I have no doubt the 1st of May protest will be bigger than the 3rd of April’s.

Hundreds of Egyptian workers demonstrate for minimum wage

My report for Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition…
Hundreds of Egyptian workers demonstrated Saturday in downtown Cairo, calling for raising the national minimum wage.

Protesters assembled in front of the ministerial cabinet in Hussein Hegazi Street, from 11 AM to roughly 2 PM. Central Security Forces soldiers and senior police officers were present, but did not intervene.

The demonstration comes on the heels of  an administrative court order, stating the government “must set a minimum wage in line with rising prices of basic commodities,” without defining a figure. The national minimum wage stands at LE35 a month, unchanged from 1984. A coalition of labor groups and NGOs, that organized Saturday’s protest, is pressing the government to raise it to LE1,200.

The court order was instigated by a lawsuit filed by the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR), a human rights NGO, against the president and the prime minister, demanding they narrow the gap between wages and soaring prices. The center provided the court with economic studies to support their request, mainly conducted by celebrity economist Ahmed el-Naggar.

Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif received the lion share of the demonstrators’ wrath on Saturday. “Nazif gives some of his close employees hundreds of thousands of Egyptian pounds a month, but gives other civil servants, like the information center employees LE99 a month,” shouted Kamal Abu Eita, the head of the independent union of property tax collectors. “Is that fair?” The crowd roared, “No! No!”

Hussein Hegazi Street is a familiar scene for Abu Eita and his comrades, who staged a national strike in December 2007, and occupied that street for a couple of weeks over pay and work conditions.

Not far away from Abu Eita, a contingent of Mahalla textile workers led by Kamal el-Fayoumi raised banners against privatization, and joined the chants against the state-backed union officials. Two years ago, in February 2008, he and other labor activists mobilized 10,000 workers from the Mahalla textile mill into the streets, demanding LE1200 as a national minimum wage. Two months later, he tried to organize a strike over the same demand, but it was aborted and he ended up in prison together with other workers, while the Nile Delta town of Mahalla erupted in a two-day uprising.

“I’ve come from Mahalla today to say that the least we deserve is LE1,200,” Fayoumi told Al-Masry Al-Youm. “The government wants to treat the workers as slaves. How can the govt (officials) go to bed, knowing there are workers who receive LE100 a month?” he exclaimed.

Over the course of three hours, delegations from different provinces joined the demonstration: Telephony and steel workers from Helwan, flax workers from Tanta, postal workers from Fayoum and Bani Sweif, food oil workers form Suez, textile workers from Alexandria, workers, tax collectors from Alexandria, Minya, Suez, Daqahliya and Giza, and others.

The protesters chanted against the president and the government, and accused the state-backed Egyptian Trade Union Federation of corruption.

A delegation that included lawyer Khaled Ali of the ECESR, Hamdeen Sabbahi, a parliamentarian with the Nasserist Karama Party and other representatives, tried to enter the ministerial cabinet headquarters around noon to hand in a copy of the administrative court order to Nazif in person, accompanied with an official request for its immediate implementation.

The delegation, however, was told the prime minister was not present in the building. The delegation refused to meet with any other officials, and left a copy of their memorandum with the prime minister’s office director.

“The government has one month to get back to us,” Ali addressed the crowd. “If the court order is not implemented, we will return with a bigger protest on 1 May.”

Ramadan Mohamed Morsi, a worker from a private food company in Suez, looked jubilant as he moved through the crowd, while talking on the mobile phone with one of his colleagues. “Listen to the chants,” he said as he stretched his arm, raising his mobile phone as close as he could to the Abu Eita’ microphone for few moments. “Tell the people back home not to be afraid. We are demonstrating here in Cairo and no one touched us.”

A working class hero

My profile of Kamal el-Fayoumi at Al-Masry Al-Youm EE…

On the morning of January 30 in 2007, two buses arrived from Mahalla to Cairo’s Shoubra district, parking a block away from the headquarters of the General Union of Textile Workers.

The bus was carrying around 200 workers from the Misr Spinning and Weaving Co — the largest textile mill in the Middle East — armed with stacks of documents, talking nervously on their mobile phones and assuring their colleagues back in the Nile Delta they had made it to the capital safely.

Minutes later the workers were inside the building hall, slamming their state-backed union officials and demanding that the impeachment of their local union members, for not backing the strike action the month before.

The strike leaders were a diverse group. Some were seasoned activists, others led by Kamal el-Fayoumi, were more vocal and militant and, surprisingly for some, their political CVs were almost blank. No membership of political parties, little if any record of organizing industrial actions.

Fayoumi and those around him stayed silent for the first hour, hardly making a contribution to the ongoing verbal badminton. That was until Said el-Gohari, NDP member and the head of the state-backed General Union, sneered the workers’ demands, saying they had no right to ask for any since their company was “not generating profits anymore.”

Fayoumi jumped off his chair and pointed at the union officials, shouting: “I’m a worker! You give me a production plan every year, and I implement it. It’s not my business what I produced later gets marketed or not. This is the management’s responsibility not mine!”

It was the beginning of a series of memorable events, for which he became famous. And it was the fight that he and his friends started on that day that would go on to inspire other workers, with a domino effect, to establish the country’s first independent trade union in half a century just two winters later.

Fayoumi, or “Sheikh Kamal,” joined the electrical power supply station of the textile flagship “Ghazl el-Mahalla,” at 18, after finishing his technical high schooling, for a basic monthly salary of LE38 that went up to LE87 with the bonuses and allowances.

“I didn’t want to work there,” he recalled. “I wanted to leave for Iraq.”

This was February 1984. Already an ongoing war between Saddam’s Iraq and the new Khomeini-led regime in Iran meant a drastic increase in the demand for foreign labor in Iraq to fill the vacuum created by the military conscription. Egypt was a premium supply source. “Everyone in Mahalla left,” Fayoumi says. “The factory and the town I swear were being emptied from its men. The salaries were low here. You had no choice but leaving to find money elsewhere. I tried to leave too, but my father insisted I stayed and found me a job at the factory, which was easy then because there were no workers in town.”

Fayoumi proudly mentions that his father was also a worker, dedicating 48 years of his life to service at the company. “But he joined during the time of the English,” he reflects. “It was different than today. He was 12 years old.”

But it might not be that different after all. Fayoumi’s father joined Ghazl el-Mahalla in 1946. The country was witnessing then a wave of mass strikes over work conditions and political demands related to independence from Britain.

The following year Ghazl el-Mahalla witnessed its first major clashes on the factory floor, with workers going on strike to protest against the sacking of colleagues in a dispute over work conditions. Police cracked down, killing three workers. The story of this strike was narrated by Fayoumi’s father to him and his three brothers and four sisters.

Fayoumi’s first taste of industrial action was in 1988, as the factory went on strike protesting the scrapping of annual grant given to workers in the fall to help pay the schooling of their children.

“I took part like any other worker,” he says. “I went outside my section to find the workers carrying a coffin, with Mubarak’s poster on it, and chanting against the government. You wouldn’t have heard anything about it then outside Mahalla. No newspapers would publish photos of that, and you didn’t have internet.”

Although the workers won the strike, the factory was about to face its worst years to date. In 1992, the Egyptian government started the Economic Reforms and Structural Adjustment Program, under the sponsorship of the World Bank and IMF. Social spending was reduced and public sector companies were put on sale for privatization. The textile sector was hit strongly.  From roughly half a million workers in 1990 the number was slashed to the half by the beginning of the new millennium.

“We had more than 35,000 workers in the (Ghazl el-Mahalla) factory, now they are less than 27,000,” Fayoumi says. “There were no promotions. The salaries were not moving upwards, but prices were.”

After 25 years of service, Fayoumi’s basic salary as a skilled worker stands at LE 500, amounting to LE950 with the allowances and bonuses. Still, he’s considered relatively more fortunate to some of his colleagues, for example who worked for 23 years with half of Fayoumi’s salary.

The decimation of the textile sector was coupled with a period of downturn for the labor movement in the 1990′s. Strikes were few, and some were met with live ammunition, as was the tragic case at the Kafr el-Dawwar branch of the Misr Spinning and Weaving Co in 1994, resulting in three deaths.

And it was no different in Mahalla. “There was so much repression,” Fayoumi says. “State Security used to summon and detain people whenever anything happened or seemed about to happen. Others would be transferred to the other provinces away from their families. The board chairmen ran the company like their own farm.”

The rise of the anti-Mubarak coalition, Kefaya, in 2004 failed to have a direct impact on Fayoumi and his colleagues in Mahalla. Although it claimed branches and offshoots in the provinces, the movement remained largely Cairene and middle class.

But in the age of satellite channels, mushrooming independent press and online media, the images of Kefaya’s protests, where they took on the president and his family directly—for long a big taboo in Egypt’s political life—made it to the TV screens and newsstands in Mahalla and elsewhere, raising some eyebrows.

“We heard of the demonstrations in Cairo,” Fayoumi comments, speaking of the 2005-6 Kefaya pro-democracy protests. “We didn’t have Kefaya activists in the factory, but seeing and hearing about those protests were motivating.”

Motivated enough by the political milieu in the country, coupled with government unfulfilled promise to pay the workers a two month bonus in December 2006 to help them cope with the increasing prices of basic commodities, the textile mill went on strike 7 December 2006. “The women began it,” he says. “They marched saying ‘where are the men? Here we are the women!’ Many men were ashamed they weren’t doing anything and joined the strike. I was among them. No one instructed me to do anything. I felt it was the right thing to do. We have had enough.”

The power station that he works at supplies the factory and part of the city with electricity. It was quickly decided among the spontaneous strike leadership that the power station had to continue working, or else the factory occupation and the city would go into darkness. He was assigned the responsibility and many humorously commented later about how the most militant “strike” leader made sure his section was “not striking.”

After three days, the strike was suspended after the state-run management submitted to raised demands.

“The workers felt their victory,” Fayoumi remarks. “We felt we could do anything afterwards.” The same feeling, it turned out, was shared by other blue-collar workers. Egypt embraced a “winter of labor discontent,” with virtually all textile mills in the Nile Delta and Alexandria striking over similar demands. Inspired by Mahalla, the cement mills went on strike, followed by the railways, garbage collectors, hospital workers, bus and metro drivers, teachers, professors.

Mahalla itself was to embrace another strike in Sept 2007 over bonus, with Fayoumi and his brethren increasingly forging ties that in effect meant an unofficial labor union that took the task of running the daily affairs of the strike and negotiating with the government officials.

The strike, which broke out in Ramadan, ended in another victory after 11 days. But the continuous mobilization on the factory floor against a state-run management meant bread and butter issues were increasingly getting “political.” The experiences of the strikers were politicizing a considerable section, including the strike leaders themselves who did not necessarily start out on an anti-government platform.

The September 2007 strike saw women workers carrying banners reading “Down with the government,” and others chanting against “World Bank and IMF colonialism.”

“I sometimes felt I was dreaming,” Fayoumi recalls. “Seeing all those people together chanting makes the biggest elephant shake. We received messages of solidarity from workers in Europe and America. The workers said ‘we are not alone,’ and this helped give us more courage.”

The workers scored another success by forcing the government to sack its appointed CEO, yet they still failed to impeach their local state-backed union men. But slowly a network was emerging around Fayoumi, came to be known as the “Textile Workers’ League,” which started a campaign of leafleting in the factories demanding raising the national minimum wage to LE1200 and the freedom to unionize. The League mobilized a twenty thousand strong protest in February 2008, and announced a strike on 6 April to push for the same demands. The police aborted the strike. Fayoumi and other members of the league were kidnapped by the security services, but the town erupted in riots for two days.

His first prison experience, Fayoumi says, only politicized him further and hardened his views regarding the government. His time in Bourg el-Arab prison was spent reading newspapers and whatever literature he could get his hands on. Later following his release, Fayoumi’s political scope transcended the boundaries of his factory, town and even country. He was among the campaigners attempting to break the Gaza siege who were rounded up briefly by the police in October last year. “In Palestine or in Egypt, it’s the same,” he says. “They are occupied and we are occupied here. If we can help the Palestinians we should do that.”

Kamal’s crusade for a free union and national minimum wage continues. But, ironically, the first independent trade union in the history of the country was declared 20 December 2008 by the property tax collectors, who had previous gone on strike the year before, occupying downtown Cairo.

“The Mahalla workers taught us how to strike,” said the president of the tax collectors’ free union Kamal Abu Eita at a Giza meeting, at which Kamal Fayoumi and his colleagues were present. “They also showed us the way forward when issued their calls for independent unions. We owe you a lot,” Abu Eita continued, pointing at Kamal and his comrades. “And we are gathered today to see how we can pay you back all those favors.”

Fayoumi, Abu Eita, and other strike leaders in the industrial sector and civil service now meet regularly, to coordinate, exchange ideas and experiences.

“We hope our attempts will evolve into a national association, but first we must win in Mahalla,” Kamal said. “The independent union will not be born except by another successful strike.”