From Thursday’s story in the Daily Star Egypt, more photos of the textile factory in the mid-Delta city of Shibin Al-Kom.
The Spinning and Weaving Factory, state-owned until recently sold to an Indian company, which took over operations this past Thursday. We talked to a security guard, quoted in the story, who eventually led us on a quick tour of a mill.
The first mill, where workers stopped and smiled at our guide, who was head of security.
Walking out of the main gate and down the main street along the factory, we saw a crowd of men walking down the street. Was there going to be a protest? Some anticipation. We walked down toward the crowd, over sticky, newly paved blacktop, and then a loud siren, prison-break-style, went off in the tower. Time for work. It was 3:00, and went off at 3:15. The evening shift, 3-11pm.
Talking to workers on the street, some reluctant, terse, others crowding around to see who we were and what others were telling us. We met one worker who, after talking to Adam for a bit, was leading us down the street, back to the factory and inside through the workers’ entrance, before the main gate.
We criss-crossed through the complex, down big factory roads and mill houses, before going inside one, maybe three or four rows from the main gate. We’d been thinking there wasn’t going to be much of a story, just one security guard and some workers on the street, reluctant. But we were led through rows of spinning machines by a 19-year-employee who only gave his first name, Ashraf, talking to worker after worker on our way to an upstairs office looking over factory floor. We sat and talked to a manager and two other men in the office, and had tea over explanations of their wages - a pound an hour, 8 hours a day, paid each month - and the sale to the Indian company. Then they showed the new working conditions under globalization — one worker to a machine that otherwise had three. Workers gathering in pockets row after row told us how it was impossible for one man to work a machine — “look at him over there, he cannot keep up with the machine.”
