The Egyptian parliament's manpower committee voted in favour of a new labour law on Tuesday. Committee head Gibali El-Maraghi said the vote comes after two years of intensive discussions and a wide-scale national dialogue on the bill's articles. “We wanted to make sure to all during this long period that the new law offers incentives and guarantees to millions of workers everywhere in Egypt,” said El-Maraghi. He said that a committee report on the new labour law will be sent to parliament's internal bureau, headed by speaker Ali Abdel-Aal. “We will ask the speaker to let this new modern labour law be discussed in plenary session as soon as possible,” said El-Maraghi. “The national dialogue on the government-drafted labour law began two years ago, and the committee was keen to listen to all views on the articles of this law in order to gain a kind of consensus among workers in all sectors,” committee secretary-general Abdel-Fattah Mohamed Abdel-Fattah said. MP Mohamed Wahballah commented that “Egypt has seen a legislative revolution over the last three years.” “Parliament has passed new laws on investment, trade unions, and the civil service and it is necessary that a new labour law be passed to complement this new package of economic legislations.” Wahballah said the new labour law is of a major interest to both investors and workers. “This law will help investors overcome many of the obstacles they face now in the area of labour issues, and on other hand it will help reduce unemployment in Egypt,” he said, adding that “the new labour law will be of particular importance to the private sector, which currently represents 75 percent of Egypt's economy, and so most of workers in Egypt are now concentrated in this sector.” MP Solaf Darwish said the committee was keen that the new labour law be in line with international conventions and be drafted in a way that should attract more foreign investments to Egypt.
