MAHALLA: More than 4,000 workers and a factory owner in Mahalla, Egypt, marched on Saturday to the City Council, announcing the initiation of a strike of more than 1,300 factories and fabric workshops with nearly 300,000 workers, reported the Center for Trade Union & Workers' Services (CTUWS). The strike is a form of objection to the rise in cotton prices which increased in the last six months from 12 thousand pounds per ton to 43 thousand pounds with the stability of the sale price of products in light of the fierce competition with imported clothes especially Chinese ones, which threatens to bring these factories to an end. The protesters also demanded the legal accountability of the former Minister of Agriculture on the deterioration of Egyptian cotton, along with the dismissal of the President of the Holding Company on the deterioration of the textile industry and the disband of the Federation of Textile Industries, which works against the industry. They also demanded the support of cotton price halting its sales tax and the stoppage of exporting the raw cotton-hair and imposing a levy on the exported yarn. The demands included supporting local sales, delivering gas to factories at nominal prices like the rest of the industrial cities, removing customs duties on imported yarn until the crisis is over, along with the removal of subsidies on the exports of yarn and also the modification of the rates of industrial control on the consumption and supply of cotton-hair by the Holding Company only and not traders, in order to prevent monopoly. The CTUWS declared its solidarity with the demands of the protesters and called upon officials to quickly intervene to protect the industry, which employs millions of workers around Egypt. The intervention, as suggested by CTUWS, is by putting a partial solution in the near term for the importation of garments by allowing limited amounts and increasing customs duties on imported apparel so that there would be a fair competition between domestic product and the imported one. It also suggested the prohibition of importation on a temporary basis until the review of previous resolutions on opening the doors of garments on wide, especially as the garment industry is one of the industries attracting labor as it operates more than a million workers along with workers in supplementary industries of dyeing, equipment and accessories. BM
