Reuters Cairo office on strike for higher wages

The strike came as an escalation after five months of negotiations with management, Journalists Syndicate chair Khaled al-Balshy told Mada Masr. Workers are demanding their salaries be raised to account for the successive devaluations of the Egyptian pound against the US dollar since March 2022, he said.

According to Balshy, negotiations began in June with a meeting with the head of Reuters' Arabic division in Cairo. Balshy, who was in attendance, said that Reuters management insisted workers’ wages were satisfactory.

However, workers have continued to submit demands since then and management’s position has ranged from complete rejection to incremental increases that did not satisfy the employees’ demands, the last of which were made a day before the Thursday strike, according to Balshy.

Reuters staff held an hour-long demonstration at the Reuters Cairo office on November 4, Balshy added. They were joined by a delegation from the syndicate to signal the start of escalation by the workers. 

Balshy said that he was heading to the Reuters office on Thursday to discuss how they could take further escalatory steps.

Mada Masr could not obtain details of the wages being offered to Reuters staff at present, but the news agency has previously offered “grossly unequal pay” to Egyptian nationals in comparison to wages offered to their international colleagues, former Cairo bureau correspondent Eric Knecht tweeted on Thursday.

Referring to the period between 2015 and 2018 during which Knecht worked for the bureau, foreign nationals were paid five or six times as much as senior local journalists, and their salaries were paid in dollars, he said.

“Every time the Egyptian pound crashes, the parent company, Thomson Reuters, saves money on salaries and increases profits. But rather than properly raise local salaries, it conducts huge share buybacks that increase executive compensation,” he claimed.

Similar strikes were carried out earlier this year at BBC’s Cairo bureau, with staff describing a gradual erosion of the benefits of working with the international media outlet as salaries have failed to keep up with the high levels of domestic inflation.