Journalist and friend Liam Stack of the Daily Star Egypt reports on the Mansoura-España Garments Company workers’s sit-in…

Since April 21, the Mansoura Spanish Garment Factory in the Nile delta has been occupied by almost 300 mainly female workers, who are staging a sit-in on the plant’s shop floor after a dispute with management over missed pay and the controversial sale of the company.
Workers say they are too poorly paid to meet many of their basic needs, a problem made worse by the failure of the company to pay them their last 17 bonuses since 1999. Additionally, they are concerned that the factory may close after a recent announcement that it was sold through a process they condemn as lacking transparency.
The protestors, many of whom recently spoke with foreign visitors while wearing dark niqabs, say they remain committed to the factory occupation despite a deal offered by Aisha Abdel Hady, the Minister of Manpower and Labor, on Tuesday May 8. According to sources on the factory union committee, which negotiated the offer, Abdel Hady agreed to pay the workers one month salary out of the Ministry budget in exchange for an immediate end to the protest.
The local union committee, which is supposed to represent the employees of Mansoura Spanish, accepted the deal without consulting them. Upon learning the details of the offer, workers rejected it. Initial media reports claimed that 70 percent of the protestors had accepted the offer and ended the sit-in, but those reports were not consistent with the scene on the shop floor.

Click on the photo below to read the full report…

[Above: The Mansoura-España Garments Company workers's sit-in. Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy, taken on 9 December 2007.]

And here’s a video taken by the anti-corruption watchdog Shayfeencom…