The Nile Cotton Ginning Company (NCGC) workers began a strike on Sunday morning in front of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, to demand payment of late salaries for the past five months and implementation of the Administrative Court ruling to return the company to the authority of the public sector.
Last week, a group of the workers met with the head of the Labour Force Committee in parliament, Amr Badr, and two delegates from the Ministry of Labour Force and the Ministry of Investment, but they did not agree on any solutions for the issue.
The meeting came following a strike by the workers in front the parliament to raise their demands.
NCGC workers have arranged several strikes over the past few months but all were met with negligence from the officials. Also in 2015, several protests took place to express refusal of the privatisation of the company.
Throughout the past few weeks, workers from various companies affiliated to the government, have organised several protests due to the prevention of their financial rights. These strikes further intended to urge the parliament to discuss the worker union’s self-drafted civil service law along with other draft laws submitted by government officials.
The NCGC was sold in 1997 to a group of investors at a time when the company had the manpower of up to 5,000 workers and was making a profit, of which the workers received shares, according to the latest budgets before the sale.
Since the sale in 1997, the company has appointed successive boards of directors, all of whom have been party to the sale of acres of lands and the assets of the company, laying workers off and other violations that have further escalated since the current board was appointed in 2008. This prompted workers to start protesting the privatisation of the company.
