Social and economic rights groups have expressed concerns over President Mohamed Morsy’s decision to amend the professional union’s law.
The amendment repealed article 23 of the law which gave unemployed, retired and disabled workers the right to retain their memberships of unions. Malek Adly of the Egyptian Centre for Social and Economic Rights (ECESR) said, “this deprives a human being from their right to belong to a union.”
Omar Adly from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said the president’s amendments will remove from the boards of the professional unions anyone over the age of 60 and will give the minister of manpower and immigration the right to appoint their replacements.
The current minister, Kahled Al-Azhary is, “a labour leader who belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood… and he will appoint Brotherhood labour,” Omar Adly said. “It gives the administration, which here means the minister, the right to appoint board members,” he added.
The ECESR as well as the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre and the Egyptian Federation for Independent Unions (EFIU) released a joint statement calling for the urgent drafting of the Union Freedoms Law. The current law only applies to official professional unions and not independent unions.
Malek Adly said, “there were talks between the government, union representatives and civil society representatives where we called for the speeding up the Union Freedoms Law.” He added that the law would provide a legal framework for independent unions, which according to the joint statement released on Monday number over 1,000. Currently Egyptian law doesn’t acknowledge independent unions.
Emad Al-Araby, media spokesperson of the EFIU, said that the law was discussed with former Prime Minister Essam Sharaf in several meetings. Al-Araby said that the most important aspects of the law is to guarantee, “that workers would have the right to choose their own unions without any kind of pressure and to exercise their union rights without any pressures from the intelligence services or state security.”
“It guarantees the independence of union activities… the government doesn’t want freedoms for the unions,” he added.
Al-Araby described Law number 35, which Morsy amended, as a sterile law that needs to be dropped and replaced with the Union Freedoms Law the EFIU (along with the ECESR and civil society organisations) are pushing for. The major problem Al-Araby sees within the current law is that, “it gave the government the ability to control unions.”
In Egypt there are professional unions and independent unions. Joining professional unions was not optional, as opposed to independent unions, “you became a member once you signed the work contract and they deducted from your salaries without asking,” said Al-Araby.
“The professional unions protect the profession and not the worker,” Al-Araby added.
In addition, the amendment extended the tenure of the boards of the professional unions. It had expired in November, 2011 and was twice renewed by SCAF for six months. Morsy also renewed the tenure for six months.
Malek Adly said, “running new elections is necessary… not renewing the board leads to the sagging of the organisations and the routine can destroy them.”
