Thousands of workers at Egypt’s Mahalla Spinning and Weaving Company have won pay rises after a week-long strike.

The government’s business sector minister conceded a rise to 6000 Egyptian pounds ($185 a month).

Egypt’s repressive President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi recently announced a rise in the minimum wage for state workers to 6000 Egyptian pounds. Many workers are paid less than this and Mahalla workers headed up a drive to win a wage rise.

Women workers began the strike on 22 February and it then spread to large sections of male workers at the company that employs 14,000 people.

Bosses thought the cost of living squeeze and the fear of job losses would shatter the walkout. Six workers were arrested and face charges of terrorism. But strikers stood firm and refused to give in.

One worker said, “Instead of responding to our legitimate requests, the company deprives us of our salaries and uses the weapon of starvation as if we were in Gaza.”

The Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists group said, “The Mahalla strike clearly announces that Egypt’s workers reject the current starvation policies, and that if these policies have been passed by the sword of repression during the past period, then remaining silent about them is no longer possible.

“Huge salaries are paid to senior state employees in the presidential office, governors, judges, army and police officers.

“A maximum limit must be set for the wages of these pashas (elites) to provide the financial resources necessary to set a minimum wage of ten thousand pounds a month.”

Inflation in Egypt is close to 40 per cent, plunging many Egyptians near or under the poverty line.

Mahalla was the detonator of a major wave of strikes which fed into the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

Ruling classes everywhere will fear economic and political revolt against the Arab regimes.

If Egypt’s workers and poor were in command and unleashed as a real solidarity force alongside the Palestinians, they would tear down the wall with Gaza.

They could inspire insurrection in other countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Iran and Syria.

This could make it impossible for imperialism to sustain its Israeli watchdog.

By Charlie Kimber, Socialist Worker UK

Sign and circulate the petition here calling for the release of strikers who are facing charges after arrests during the strike

The post Victory for strikers at Egypt’s Mahalla factory first appeared on Solidarity Online.

6 servings

You will need
5 oz. butter
6 chicken breasts, boned (each 4 oz.)
6 chicken fillets
6 chicken legs without meat, boiled
¾ cup flour
2 egg, mixed with little milk
little bread crumbs
6 white bread slices, crusts trimmed
vegetable oil for frying
salt
pepper

Garnish:
8 tablespoons canned green peas
2 medium carrots, sliced and glazed*
6 small tomatoes
6 lemon slices
pickled cucumber
little watercress

*Carrots steamed in butter and glazed with a little sugar. (See Recipe 8.)

Divide the butter into 4, and shape each into a thick stick. Let cool and harden.

Remove the ligaments from the chicken breasts and pound flat with the back of a knife. Season with salt and pepper. Also salt and pepper the chicken filets. Wrap the butter stick in the fillet, and then in the flattened breast. Shape each with chicken legs inserted.

Dredge with flour, beaten egg and bread crumbs. Repeat twice.

Deep-fry the bread slices in hot oil 300°F. until crisp. Then brown chicken cutlet.

Place chicken on fried bread slices and garnish with boiled green peas, glazed carrots, tomatoes, lemon slices, pickled cucumber and watercress.

Before eating, remove the bread slices from the chicken. Cut the chicken to spurt the melted butter, which is used as sauce.

©️Shufunotomo Co., Ltd., Japan 1973

About 1.4 million people marched across Germany at the end of January against the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party.

The country has been rocked by revelations that leading AfD politicians secretly met open Nazis to discuss organising mass deportations, targeting millions of migrants, asylum-seekers and German citizens of foreign origin.

This meeting was not the first of its kind and signals the increasing confidence of the racist far right. The German political world has reacted with an outpouring of rage. The political mainstream, such as German Premier Olaf Scholz, have condemned the AfD as leading “an attack against our democracy”.

However, it is mainstream parties like Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (similar to our Labor Party) who have helped legitimise such disgusting racism through their willingness to make concessions on refugee rights. This has ranged from allowing the suspension of family reunification rights to signalling support for the outsourcing of asylum applications to African countries.

Last October, in response to pro-Palestine protests in Germany, he was quoted as saying, “We must finally deport on a large scale.”

The policies of neoliberalism and austerity which have been pursued by successive German coalition governments have given oxygen to the AfD, which has attempted to capitalise on the discontent. The current government has doubled the military budget, raised fuel prices and is failing to reach even its own climate targets.

The AfD is currently polling more than 20 per cent of the vote, making it Germany’s second largest party. It has 78 seats in the national parliament and 40,000 members. The party has an organised hard right wing including leading figure Bjorn Hocke with direct links to Nazis.

Rising far right

What has led to the rise of a European far right with so much legitimacy? The mainstream parties’ commitment for decades to austerity policies combined with the rising cost of living has produced deep bitterness with the political system.

Mainstream electoral parties have also increasingly embraced anti-refugee policies and racist and Islamophobic talking points. This has only legitimised and fuelled the far right.

Suella Braverman, the former British Tory Home Secretary, openly used racism to label asylum-seekers a threat, characterising them as an, “existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West”.

Similarly, Italian fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has struck a deal to process asylum-seekers rescued at sea in offshore detention camps in Albania, after a green light from the European Union. Left-wing critics such as the leader of the More Europe party Riccardo Magi have described this as an “Italian Guantanamo”.

The far right is still on the rise across Europe. Geert Wilders, who was sentenced for hate speech after advocating the ethnic cleansing of Moroccan-Dutch people in 2017, won the Dutch elections in November with his PVV party on a platform of explicit Islamophobia, calling for the removal of “Islamic schools, mosques and the Quran”.

In Slovakia recently elected Prime Minister Robert Fico said in 2016 he wouldn’t accept “one single Muslim” migrant.

In France Marine Le Pen’s National Rally looks set to come first in this year’s European elections, with the total vote for far right parties at 37 per cent, and could win the next presidential election.

The resistance by the European mainstream liberal, centre and centre-left parties has been weak at best and cravenly opportunistic at worst.

French President Emmanuel Macron, in a desperate attempt to avoid being outflanked by Le Pen, has engaged in his own Islamophobic and anti-migrant policy decisions, recently passing a racist and controversial law making it harder for migrants’ children to become citizens and cancelling residence permits on vague grounds of opposing “Republican values”.

This passed parliament only due to the support of the fascist National Rally, which claimed the bill as “an ideological victory”.

French student activists have protested and blockaded universities and union leaders have condemned the law. A few workplaces were able to hold anti-racist strikes but the union leaders failed to mobilise action on the scale needed.

The cowardly opportunism of the French centre under Macron, and the troubling rise of the right as well as the normalisation of its policies and rhetoric, points to the need to build the grassroots anti-racist struggle urgently.

The political mainstream of Europe has both made concessions to the racist rhetoric of the far right and failed to build a fighting alternative on the streets.

It is therefore up to rank-and-file workers, together with left-wing activists and students, to build the mass anti-racist struggle needed.

By Jack Stubley

The post Mass protests target German AfD as far right on the rise first appeared on Solidarity Online.

Preparation: approx. 10 min.
Cooking time: approx. 10 min.

Ingredients:
5-6 hg fresh or frozen plaice fillets
½ tbsp salt
1 tbsp melted butter or margarine
1 egg
white pepper
4 tbsp breadcrumbs
4 tbsp grated cheese (preferably manorhouse cheese)

Garnish:
1 lemon
anchovy fillets
olives or herbs

Preparation:

1. Divide the fillets if they are too large.
2. Rub them with salt and leave them to soak for a while.
3. Mix the beaten eggs with a little melted butter and season with white pepper.
4. Brush the fish with the mixture.
5. Mix the flour and grated cheese. Turn the fish fillets in the mixture.
6. Fry the fillets until crispy brown on both sides in a frying pan that is not too hot.
7. Add the prepared garnish of a lemon slice with an anchovy fillet rolled around an olive.
8. In the absence of olives, fill the anchovy roll with chopped herbs.
9. Serve freshly boiled potatoes and preferably a fresh green salad too.

Poorly translated from the original Swedish using Google Translate

©️Hemmets Journal AB S/K/2