Egyptalum workers strike to protest profit-share reduction

Workers at the state-owned Egyptian Aluminum Company in Qena began a partial strike on Tuesday to protest the company’s decision to reduce their profit shares, two workers at the company told Mada Masr.

The workers began a sit-in inside the company factory in Nag Hammadi on Monday night to protest management’s decision to reduce workers profit shares to about half the value they are entitled to per the company’s regulations, one of the workers told Mada Masr, speaking on condition of anonymity. 

Company regulations state that workers should receive a 12 percent share of the net profits, which stood at LE9.35 billion in the current year, one worker explained. 

Management has tried to avoid matching that percentage over recent years citing low rates of profit, continuing the practice of evading regulations this year despite achieving sizable net revenue. 

On Tuesday morning, after management ignored the workers’ demand to receive their full portion of profits as stipulated, the sit-in turned into a strike, with workers partially halting production and adding demands for an increase to the meal and the cost of living allowances paid by the company, according to the worker.

The other worker noted that halting work at metal-smelting cells imposes a sense of urgency to the strike, as stopping them for more than seven hours will raise its temperature to unstable degrees causing damage to the cell and costing the company millions of pounds — negatively affecting both management and workers.

The worker noted that the employees, about 3,500 people, are mostly young men who receive a basic wage of about LE1,000-1,200 that increases to a maximum of about LE5,000 monthly following the addition of  allowances and bonuses. As a result, many of them rely on the annual profit share.

The company’s low pay has rendered the cost of living a challenge for workers amid a massive inflationary wave that has hit Egypt during the past years, exacerbated by a foreign currency shortage and successive devaluations of the pound that have raised prices sharply. 

The salaries also remain below the new minimum wage of LE6,000 introduced this year by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a rate evaded by thousands of private and public sector companies whether through a legal plea to the government or without one.

One of the two workers explained that years ago, the company used to distribute a fixed profit share equivalent to the basic salary of 18 months, dispersed throughout the year.

The system changed in 2020, however, when the Public Enterprise Ministry, led then by Hisham Tawfiq, decided that profit share bonuses would instead be calculated at the rate of 12 percent of the company’s variable annual net profit.

However, the company management employed different tactics to avoid giving the workers the stipulated percentage fully in the following years.

With the disruption of production and sales during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company said there were no profits and workers did not receive any profit shares for two years, the worker said.

However, the worker said, as production and aluminum prices increased in the years following the pandemic, the company achieved a net profit of about LE6 billion last year. 

The company decided at the time to calculate the net profit as just LE4 billion, but workers still received a profit share equivalent to the basic salary for 56 months  as opposed to the 12 percent workers are entitled to.

This year, with the company’s net profit doubling that of 2022, workers expected their profit shares to double this year as well, but were  surprised when management decided to calculate their profit share at only the equivalent to 66 months worth of the basic salary. “We accepted that there were no profits during the covid period. Now, when things are going fine, you say I get nothing?” the worker said.