CAIRO: Amonisto workers did not try to storm the People's Assembly on Sunday, rights activist Khaled Ali said, suggesting that the decision to remove the protests near parliament had already been taken by security forces earlier the same day. There were “three rows of riot police which surrounded Amonsito workers on Sunday morning,” Khaled Ali, director of the Egyptian Center for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ECESCR), told a press conference Tuesday. Workers from the Amonsito and Telephone Equipment Companies described their grievances during the press conference, two days after they were forced to break-up the sit-ins they had been staging outside the People's Assembly. “What happened proves that the government's claims that the emergency law would only be applied in terrorism and drugs cases are untrue,” Ali added. Khaled El-Shishawy, head of Amonsito's union committee, explained that clashes occurred between Amonsito workers and the police happened when workers tried to march to a branch of Banque Misr, the company's creditor, in order to protest there. This followed the failure of negotiations between workers and representatives of Banque Misr, the Egyptian Trade Union Federation and the manpower ministry. In March, an agreement was signed under which workers from the debt-ridden company were meant to receive LE 106 million. On Sunday they discovered that this had been reduced to LE 50 million. Amonsito union committee member Osama Farouq said that workers had entered negotiations “hoping that we might be told something new.” “But when we arrived we found that a decision had already been made. Every time we tried to speak, they silenced us,” Farouq said during the press conference, which was held at the ECESCR office. Amr El-Sayyed from the Telephone Equipment Company said that employees began protesting in 2005 when they demanded that they be made permanent and receive insurance payments and be given a share of profits. El-Sayyed said that they began their 45-day sit-in outside parliament after not being paid for four months. Workers — none of whom has been with the company for more than nine years — demanded LE 9,000 compensation for every year of employment. They were offered a maximum of a lump sum of LE 50,000. Nine workers went on hunger strike during the sit-in which was dispersed by security bodies on Sunday. Ali questioned why protests by the Nubareyya and Telephone Equipment Companies were dispersed when it was only Amonsito workers who had clashed with police, adding that “new methods of protest” by workers had prompted the reaction by security bodies. “When workers removed their clothes and wrote on their bodies they succeeded in winning the sympathy of society and convincing it that the government does not fulfill its promises and lacks instruments of democratic dialogue,” Ali said.
