Just a job

May Day finds Egyptian workers with little to celebrate. Fatemah Farag finds out why
We opted for Japanese, a Tepanyaki dinner, and no sooner were we seated than the show began. A feast was being prepared -- and not just for the taste buds -- but for our eyes, ears and noses. Sometimes with energy, sometimes languid and sensual, but always in perfect rhythm, our chef sliced vegetables, cooked shrimp and fried rice. The exact angle of every move of his arm, the perfect sharpness of every scent -- we could have been in Japan. But we were in Sharm El-Sheikh, the most famous of Sinai's resort towns, and our chef could have been Japanese, but he was Egyptian.
Emad, as it turned out, has never been to Japan. He came from the Delta to Sinai in search of work in the tourism industry and learnt his craft under the direction of a Japanese cook contracted by a five-star hotel. He is the product of an industry that has repeatedly promised to be the engine driving the Egyptian economy to prosperity and better times; an industry that has promised Emad and his like jobs, not unemployment. But for all of Emad's expertise, his job, and professional future, are far from secure.
For a couple of years now, the Egyptian economy has been suffering, its condition worsened by 11 September. As the waiter who expertly uncorked our bottle of wine lamented: "Whenever something happens to slow down tourism, the first people to lose their income are the local staff." Indeed, in the very resort where they work, Prime Minister Atef Ebeid confirmed these men's worst fears: he announced to the donors' conference last February that, as a result of global recession, Egypt would lose the ability to generate 370,000 jobs, 30 per cent of which would be losses in the tourism sector. It is enough to turn a good wine sour.
It should have come as no surprise, then, that this year's Labour Day celebrations were muted. A few drab signs hung limply from the windows of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU), mostly interminable official lists reiterating yet again those things that need to be done to improve labour's lot. In case anyone missed them before, the Minister of Manpower and Training Ahmed El-Amawy repeated them loud and clear: the need to pass the draft Unified Labour Law (still winding its way through a labyrinth of Shura Council and Parliamentary councils); the need to amend the Social Insurance Law; the need to better regulate and protect expatriate labour; the need to implement a national training programme so that workers' skills could match the needs of the market; the need to compensate and protect workers who have increasingly been losing jobs as a result of closures; the need to eliminate child labour.
According to GFTU, all of this will be achieved in conformity with the development of a market economy premised on privatisation. The national trade union, however, seems unclear about how this is going to come about. El-Sayed Rashed, head of the GFTU, candidly pointed out recently that the early retirement scheme, considered a prerequisite of the sale of state-run enterprises, has been stalled due to lack of funds.
And while the education system continues to produce young graduates with skills unwanted by the market, those supposedly in demand, like Sharm El-Sheikh's Emad, continue to find their dream of a secure job highly elusive.
It is not just the tourism industry. The 650 skilled textile workers who recently lost their jobs as a result of factory closure had skill and experience (10 years, on average) in abundance, and worked in an industry which supposedly enjoys 40 per cent of the country's flow of capital and a high proportion of government investment (90 per cent in spinning, 60 per cent in weaving, 30 per cent in ready-made garment factories).
According to Nagla El-Ehwany and Heba El-Laithy in Poverty, Employment and Policy-Making in Egypt, published by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Egyptian labour is reaping the results of the "many distortions and disequilibria [of the past two decades]... the slow rate and distorted structure of employment growth; segmentation along several divides; mounting rates of unemployment among the educated; increasing... 'feminisation' and 'ruralisation' of unemployment; the growing role of the informal sector during the nineties and the sharp decline in real wages in all sectors of the national economy."
The authors conclude that this is "a natural outcome of the complete divorce between macro-economic policies and employment policies. In fact, Egypt never had a systematic strategy for the labour market."
And while few would dispute the report's conclusion that it is up to decision-makers to create sufficient, permanent and productive jobs to reduce unemployment, policy- makers are balking at the ramifications.
"The problem is two-fold," said a senior member of GFTU, who preferred to remain anonymous. "On the one hand you have the young people who are coming onto the market and who cannot find employment. On the other, those who were in work are increasingly finding themselves on the street. It is difficult, when you have limited resources, to know where to start."
Last year alone, the Ministry of Manpower and Training disbursed LE442,000 -- out of a special emergency fund -- in compensation for workers who lost jobs as a result of factory closure. The ministry has also looked into 752 collective complaints expressing the grievances (most of which are related to unfair lay-offs) of 35,000 workers, in addition to 7,000 individual complaints. According to the GFTU official, "this does not represent the total number of those with grievances. But the responsible authorities in government are being called on now to play both the role of privatiser and employer; this is very difficult and expensive."
But the sheer size of the problem (800,000 people enter the job market annually and unemployment is estimated to range anywhere between 7.6 per cent to 20 per cent of the workforce), has given the government no choice but to step in. On Saturday, the ministry released yet another issue of the National Job Bulletin, which announced 11,000 job opportunities, paying between LE150 to LE3,000 a month, in both the public and private sectors and covering all specialisations.
On his way to pick up one of these brochures, I met Mohamed, who has graduated with a diploma and who is currently a temporary worker at a multinational-owned factory. "Life has become a continual search for a job and I do not even know what I should be looking for anymore. We are three brothers, two of us workers, the youngest, a college graduate. All three of us spend our time either looking for jobs, taking temporary work or sitting at the coffee-house," he said.
The government's list of ways to improve working conditions left him cold. The only question that seemed to matter was: "Will any of these things get me a stable job anytime soon?"
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