The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) issued a paper on Wednesday analysing the draft labor law currently under discussion in the parliament. The EIPR paper notes in its introduction that after several months of discussions in parliament, the draft new labour code is once again in the drafting stage, with the purported aim of “finding a balance between the rights of employers and employees, achieving consensus between all parties and realising as much as is practicable the interest of the public.” This is according to Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Alaeddin Fouad, after the draft met with numerous objections from business owners represented by chambers of commerce and industry, as well as from official labor unions. 

EIPR’s analysis noted that the government assumes that the new draft it submitted to parliament addresses the flaws that resulted from the application of the labor law since 2003, according to the section in the bill explaining the philosophy of the new law, regarding the incompatibility of some of its articles with the 2014 constitution and international labor conventions, or the imbalance between the different parties to production and the failure to settle labor disputes amicably.

The paper “Egypt’s Draft Labour Code: A Human Rights Analysis” explains that the draft law regulating labour relations for nearly 25 million workers and employees, which the government has been working on for nearly seven years, aspires to link wages to production “to reassure national and foreign investors and motivate workers to exert effort to maximize their productivity,” among other goals. However, its most important omission is linking wages to the rate of inflation and the price increases, which undermines the “balance and desired fairness between the two parties to the labour relationship” that the law sets among its objectives.

The EIPR commentary emphasized that although the draft law contains a number of positive amendments that provide for better workers' rights compared to the law currently in place; it overlooks many of the flaws and contradictions in the 2003 law, leaving them unchanged. It also introduced some articles that effectively diminish many workers' rights, most notably the right to strike, as the amendments to the law include the possibility of “prohibiting the call or announcement of a strike in exceptional circumstances,” without specifying what those circumstances are.

EIPR’s analysis tackles several aspects of the draft code, focusing on the articles governing wages and the periodic allowance, labour strikes, labour contracts and the termination of the employment relationship, the status of irregular workers, and some of the rights of women workers. The paper proposes amendments to these articles, which are highly relevant to ensuring the stability of labour relations between the three parties to the labour and production process: employers, workers, and society more broadly.  The paper’s recommendations also aim to protect for workers the occupational and economic rights enshrined in the Egyptian constitution and international conventions.

The main recommendations of the paper are as follows:

• The amended labour law is an extension of policies that favour employers and investors over employees who have been working for decades in a situation where the living standards of wage earners are declining, poverty rates among them are increasing, and their share of GDP is declining. Some of the amendments might exacerbate these conditions and pave the way for legalising existing violations of workers' rights related to fixed-term contracts. They might also seriously affect labour relations and reduce the workers' opportunities to defend their rights, such as strikes, through legal and constitutional channels. Therefore, the philosophy of the law needs to be amended in a way that restores some balance to rights in line with the international agreements to which Egypt is committed.

• The role of societal dialogue must be activated during the discussion of the law in the House of Representatives. Hearing sessions must be held for various labour organisations, trade unions, and civil society organisations and their contributions should be considered in parliamentary discussions of the law.

• Article 12 on allowances should be amended to provide for a percentage of the gross salary linked to the inflation rate announced by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics, instead of 3% of the social insurance salary.

• The articles regulating strikes should be amended to ensure that workers enjoy their right to all kinds of peaceful strikes, upon notification, and to start their strike without setting an end date. The article allowing the prohibition of strikes in unspecified exceptional circumstances should be repealed.

• No specific sectors should be banned from exercising their constitutional right to strike as long as this right does not threaten lives or public and private property. If there is a fundamental necessity for such a ban, it must be clarified in the law. It should not be issued by administrative decisions that are not monitored by parliament. Specific facilities and functions should also be identified, not depriving entire sectors of their constitutional right, as is the case now.

• Articles 70 and 71 regulating the termination of the individual employment relationship should be redrafted, as they include confusing and contradictory provisions, and allow for the arbitrary dismissal of workers and reproduce the flaws of the current labour law. The cases of fixed-term contracts detailed in Article 70, such as seasonal work whose term ends with the end of the agreed work mission, should be specified. The third item in Article 71 should also be amended to stipulate that the fixed-term contract is considered a permanent contract in the event of its renewal for a period of two years, based on the definition of temporary work stipulated in the draft law submitted by the Ministry of Manpower in 2016, which says: "An individual employment contract shall be concluded for an indefinite period, and may be concluded for a fixed period in the case of seasonal work or other activities in which indefinite contracts cannot be resorted to by virtue of their nature or customs".

• The new labour law should detail all the functions of the fund for the protection and employment of irregular workers that will be established and clarify how its funds will be run. It should also explicitly stipulate the rights of irregular workers and the acceptable minimum limits without any administrative decisions taken outside the scope of the law.

• The labour law should cover female domestic workers, as many of them are considered irregular workers covered by the law.

• The benefits of childcare within families should be provided to both men and women as partners in family tasks, and the establishments that employ workers with children should provide these benefits. Also, the amendment proposed by the minister of manpower to reduce paternity leave during childbirth to one day should be repealed.