Razor manufacturer fires 38 workers after strike

Razor manufacturer Lord for Industry and Trade fired 38 workers who took part in a strike involving some 2,000 workers at the company that began last week and brought production in two out of the company’s three factories to a halt.

In a separate statement, the company also said that it had referred “some” of the striking workers for internal investigation.

The striking workers, who entered a sixth day of strike action on Sunday, are calling for transparency around the company’s annual profits, a minimum profit share rate of LE2,000, and for their annually renewable contracts to be changed to permanent ones. They also demanded that management guarantee protesting workers would not face disciplinary action or dismissal. “We have been deprived of a representative union,” said a worker, recalling a former colleague who led efforts to form a union and who was later fired by the company.

Yet in two statements released on Sunday, the company announced that workers described as the “instigators of the strike” would be fired or suspended, and that those suspended could also face disciplinary measures and further investigation. The company said it had tried to “convince the workers to stop committing these illegal violations,” citing what it said was the opinion of the labor relations office at the Manpower Ministry. 

One of the workers on strike told Mada Masr on condition of anonymity that “representatives from the Manpower Ministry’s labor relations office actively participated as mediators between the company’s management and the workers last Tuesday and expressed their understanding of the workers’ demands and their right to strike.” Yet, in an apparent U-turn on Wednesday, ministry representatives began to ask workers to put a stop to the action. “We refused,” the worker said, “due to the company’s intransigence in taking our demands seriously.”

The worker also said that over the weekend, “management phoned around workers whose contracts are about to expire,” threatening that their contracts would be terminated if they did not stop striking and return to work, a tactic that a researcher from the Center for Trade Unions and Workers Services said could suggest the company is trying to sidestep its obligation to hand out severance pay. 

The researcher, Hussein al-Masry, added that any workers who have had annual contracts renewed successively should be treated as permanent workers under labor laws, but that Lord intentionally allows contracts to expire before signing off on new ones, leaving its workers briefly contractless. This tactic, Masry says, makes it “easier for the company to fire workers in retaliation for practicing their right to strike.”

According to a Lord worker who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity last week, workers decided to take action after payments handed out in June were substantially lower than expected, with cuts to the normal rate of monthly profit shares and to bonuses for production and for the Eid holiday.

In the negotiations brokered by Manpower Ministry representatives on Tuesday, Lord company management agreed verbally to raise their bottom-line wage to LE2,400, a minimum set for the first time ever in Egypt by the National Council for Wages at the end of June. Yet, the company’s representatives have thus far evaded the other demands.