The Cairo Public Transportation workers are starting a strike in all the Cairo garages, 6am, demanding the modernization/replacement of the obsolete buses and spare parts, raising allowances related to work hazards, increasing bonuses, reforming the health services, and CALLING FOR THE FORMATION OF A FREE UNION, independent from the CORRUPT STATE-BACKED NDP-RUN EGYPTIAN GENERAL FEDERATION OF TRADE UNIONS.
The strike leaders are already coming under severe security pressures to abort the strike, as I’m blogging now, and some have expressed fear of arrest.
UPDATE: The strike has been aborted, early Wednesday morning, due to pressures from the police and the Ministry of Transportation officials.
Mounir Fawzi Ahmad, a 37-year-old who’s been working at the Public Transportation Authority as a calligrapher for the past 10 years, for a basic monthly salary of LE179 that goes up with the bonuses to a pathetic LE350.
His job at el-Mostaqba Garage includes painting the busses’ license plates and the side placards that carry the names of the Garages and stations. Not only does he have to put up with the ridicule he occasionally receives from his managers for being a dwarf, but also he is not given any art supplies for his work. No brushes, no paints, nothing… Mounir has to buy these supplies on his own expense!
“I can’t afford buying these things every month,” he said. “And if the placards don’t get painted, I receive financial penalties. The management cuts my salary, so it becomes even more difficult for me to buy the supplies the following month. So I end up borrowing money in order to be able to do my job.”
The government has played a dirty game in order to decimate the public transport service over the past decade.
The regime has made its desire to privatize the transport sector (railways and buses) no secret more than once. However, it was never an easy job. Such attempts were met with fierce opposition by the workers, and each time the transportation minister made statements about potential privatization schemes, threats of strikes loomed.
In the railways, the govt strategy rested on privatizing the “services,” like bringing a private company to run the catering on sleeping trains, instead of selling the sector already troubled with industrial actions that could explode even stronger.
In the public transportation sector, the govt resorted to what I describe as nothing short of murder.
The government has started to cut down the supply of spare parts to the old buses around five years ago. I don’t have any figures yet. But every striker in El-Mostaqbal Garage I interviewed repeated the same accusation: No spare parts are given to us starting from five years ago. The workers said they were instructed to take whatever parts they needed from older buses.
This meant the number of operating buses on every route line started dwindling, with buses going obsolete and rusting out day by day. No need to mention the implications that have had on the safety of the drivers and the passengers. Grab a local newspaper any day and bus crashes due to mechanical failures are almost a daily news item.
These are not accidents. These are cases of the state murdering its own poor citizens. Who gives a shit about those whose incomes can only afford them a ride in these public buses anyways?
And then the government opens the door for private companies to step in and operate their buses, with a higher ticket fee, on the same routes taken by the public transport buses. So if no public transport buses are available because they are literally dying, the citizen will have no choice but to hop onto the new private mini-buses or the micro-buses. Such private companies made sure their buses operated during the two day strike. I spotted on my way from Nasr City to downtown Cairo on the second day of the strike few of them in Abbassiya and Ramses, that belonged to Lebanon and El-Badr Companies.
So as you can see, the plan was simple. Kill old buses by not providing spare parts. Let private companies buses operate their vehicles on the same routes. The end result: privatization by other means.
Public transportation strikers, El-Mostaqbal Garage, Nasr City…
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