Every day, dozens of men like forty-five year-old Ali Salama wait for long hours under the broiling sun, in hopes of a bad deal. They stand in strategic spots around Sidi Awad Square in Qalyobia City, on the lookout for a Godot, a contractor, to appear in a pick-up truck and give them work for the day. But with each hour that passes, the supply of day labourers outweighs the Godot’s demand; Salama will either wait in vain or be forced to accept the lowest price.

Every day, dozens of men like forty-five year-old Ali Salama wait for long hours under the broiling sun, in hopes of a bad deal. They stand in strategic spots around Sidi Awad Square in Qalyobia City, on the lookout for a Godot, a contractor, to appear in a pick-up truck and give them work for the day. But with each hour that passes, the supply of day labourers outweighs the Godot’s demand; Salama will either wait in vain or be forced to accept the lowest price.

“Sometimes I wait from seven o’clock in the morning to half-past one in the afternoon and nobody shows up,” says Salama. “One day I’m working, the next five I’m not. I do not know how to go back home to face the problem of feeding two children and looking into the eyes of two older daughters who will soon get married and need money.”

Since the beginning of the privatization program in Egypt in the mid 1990s, state-owned factories, companies and establishments were sold and hundreds of thousands of workers like Salama were left jobless. “I worked as a textile worker at ESCO for spinning and weaving for seven years before they privatized it and dismissed its temporary labourers like me,” Salama remembers. “I got fired without any compensation. I couldn’t find any job but to work as a day-labourer”.

The fair wages withheld from day labourers, says Ahmad ad-Dabbah, the head of the independent Day Labour Trade Union, go to the state and its administrative bodies. The Day Labour Trade Union was established a year ago in the early months of the revolution when independent trade unions witnessed a boost in membership. Dabbah believes that workers like Salama could be helped by amendments in the bidding and tendering laws of 1989, by requiring that every building contractor who recruits a worker must enrol that worker in a union.

The current law, ad-Dabbah insists, allows for slavery. “Around 16 to 18 million day workers constitute a broad sector throughout the Egyptian economy,” ad-Dabbah says. “For each building license, the contractor should pay 3,500 Egyptian pounds as insurance for the workers. The workers pay 5% of their income to the government as taxes. This means that between 2000 and 2011, day labourers paid the state as much as 80 billion pounds in insurance!”

“We don’t know where the money goes,”Dabbah adds. “The government does not spend it on anything that benefits the workers.”

A Fisherman in the Market

Hamid Muhammad leisurely smokes a hookah, a water pipe, in a coffee shop in Sidi Awad Square. He is well known in this area and many greet him as they walk by. “A contractor or engineer might call me requesting some workers for a mission of one to two days,” he explains. “Then I go to the market of men.”

“We recruit labour for various demolition and construction works, including carrying sand, bricks, scrap, waste, and a few concrete works. Construction contractors have their own permanent workers while we bring in the lower level. Our gain comes from the difference between the price we and the engineers agree upon and what we and the worker agree upon. The margin is not large.”

For 50 Egyptian pounds per day, Salama works at least ten hours yet rarely works more than two days per week. “I do not deceive anyone,” insists Muhammad the contractor, “And I respect my workers. This job is based on relationships and trust, and my workers and the engineers trust me, and I always try to balance between all considerations.”

Salama, however, says he and other day labourers get the short end of the stick, earning a fifth of what they used to as permanent workers, while risking their lives for backbreaking labour. “Imagine a man of my age carrying endless bags of sand all day long to upper stories!” Salama says. “I sometimes miraculously survive a collapsing wall There are neither safety equipment, nor compensations in case of injury. I know two workers who became crippled after falling from a scaffold.”

A Sign of Change?

“Within one year only, we have managed to enrol about 11,400 members in our new union,” says ad-Dabbah. “We can divide these workers into three categories: uninsured workers who do not belong to any enterprise or trade union; uninsured workers working for an enterprise but don’t belong to a union; and insured workers working for enterprises but have no union of their own.”

The primary role of this newly established union is to convince insurance companies to provide healthcare to union members and their families in exchange for a 30% profit. Ad-Dabbah claims that the “Islamic parliament” and the military council have reduced the role of new trade unions to creating funds for union members that pay minimal compensation for terminations, disability and death.

“Our union does not require strict enrolment procedures, but there is a prevalent culture among workers that each unionist is a thief and steals their union dues. We believe in the awareness created by the revolution that has proved to everybody that collective confrontation with the government is the solution to acquiring gains for the whole society,” concluded Ad-Dabbah.

Salama, however, is not as optimistic about the gains of the revolution. He believes it has aggravated the labour crisis and allows day labour contractors, he claims, to deduct as much as 50% of the workers’ wages for profit. “Anything is better than just sitting at home,” Salama concedes. “But what else can I do, especially with the accumulated debts I owe? I hope to save some money to buy a tuk-tuk, three-wheeled motorcycle, to invest in my own capital instead of this devilish job.”