WHAT make tens of people leave the warmth of their homes to stage a days-long si -in on the pavement outside the Cabinet building? The Government should have thought about this on the very first day of the sit-in by workers at Tanta Flax Company. These poor citizens from the Delta city of Tanta travelled all the way to central Cairo and made their way to the Cabinet building in Qasr el-Aini Street, in order to ask the Government to mediate with the new owner of their company. For more than nine months, about 1,000 workers at Tanta Flax Company have been on strike, because the new owner, a Saudi investor named Abdullah el-Kahki, stopped their annual allowance and even gave some of them the sack. He hasn't paid the workers their salaries and even closed the factory last December. Since then, the workers have been in limbo, neither being given their financial dues nor being offered early retirement. Instead of taking the side of the workers against this tyrannical Arab investor, Minister of Manpower Aisha Abdel-Hadi has apparently abandoned them and even provoked their anger by requesting them to forget about the laws governing their relations with the new owner of the company and relying on negotiations and bargaining instead, in order to obtain some of their rights. Instead of learning from the mistakes of privatisation and including clear conditions in the privatisation contracts, thereby guaranteeing the rights of the workers, the Government insists on committing the same mistakes, making the queues of the unemployed even longer. Most astonishingly, these investors often purchase public-sector companies for trivial prices, far less than their assets are worth. Such investors, most of whom pay in instalments or with loans from Egyptian banks, aren't really interested in developing these companies and benefiting the Egyptian economy and their workers. Instead, they sometimes make the company go bankrupt, so that they can sell its assets and make a huge profit. Will the Government continue to turn a deaf ear to the complaints of 1,000 workers whose families are threatened with the terrifying spectre of desperate poverty?
