Egypt’s home delivery workers: Toward integration in the formal economy?

Doaa A.Moneim , Saturday 30 Jul 2022

Tens of thousands of Egyptians who work as home delivery couriers – known in Arabic as tayareen, or pilots – face hard working conditions and enjoy minimal social protections.

Ahram Online attempted to obtain official figures from the concerned ministries, the International Labour Organisation and the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), to determine the number of home delivery couriers operating in the country, yet the concerned authorities had no clear figures in this respect.

However, an examination of the databases of a number of home delivery applications suggests that home delivery couriers working in Egypt could exceed 500,000, which is about one-third of the country's irregular workers.

Home delivery workers usually work 12-hour shifts without health insurance or pensions and cannot rely on a stable income.

Many couriers work through registering on a database for various online home delivery platform applications without entering into a direct contractual relationship with the business owner.

These app couriers receive between 10 to 20 percent as a commission per order and rely heavily on tips, according to Sayed El-Aasmar and Mohamed El-Tayar, two couriers who spoke to Ahram Online.

They use their own motorcycles or means of transportation in their delivery work, paying for gasoline and repairs.

Many are now trying to improve their wages and living conditions, and there are initiatives to organise and integrate them into the formal economy.

Through its socio-economic development plan for the current FY2022/23, which started on 1 July, Egypt’s House of Representatives has urged the concerned bodies to implement a number of procedures that would protect the rights of non-organised and informal workers.

The House called for issuing a practice-of-profession licence for these workers, including them under the social protection umbrella, facilitating their inclusion in the formal economy, and providing them with training to develop their skills.

Amid challenging economic conditions brought about by the Ukraine war, 12,000 couriers working for Talabat – an online food ordering company – went on a two-day strike in April to demand higher wages.

A number of recent initiatives by the Ministry of Social Solidarity and Egyptian Trade Union Federation aim to ensure representation for this category of workers, especially since the online shopping and ecommerce market is expected to grow even larger.

According to Statista, Egypt is the second largest market for online shopping in Africa after South Africa.

Media outlets reported after the Talabaat strike that the government is considering creating a trade union to represent home delivery workers to guarantee them the rights available to other workers.

Mirvat Sabreen, the assistant to the social solidarity minister, revealed to Ahram Online that the ministry has received a proposal to cooperate with a number of online applications to promote the rights of couriers.

Sabreen also said that the ministry is set to sign a number of cooperation protocols with these applications in this regard, without providing further details.

A source at the social solidarity ministry told Ahram Online that the ministry's initiative involves putting in place a framework that governs home delivery services in Egypt, protecting workers' rights as well as holding them to a system of accountability.

“The ministry is working on an initiative that will be sponsored by a number of online shopping applications that are operating in the local market," the source said.

"This initiative includes founding an association that will be affiliated with the ministry and will represent home delivery workers, engaging them in the formal economy."

The source added that the initiative also involves supplying delivery workers with helmets and other protective gear to protect them against traffic accidents.

"It also involves issuing insurance policies against accidents in collaboration with a life insurance company in Egypt. The initiative also involves collaboration with leasing companies to enable couriers to purchase their needs in instalments,” the source explained.

The initiative, which will be implemented in phases, also involves providing couriers with training and awareness sessions, according to the source.

The delivery service Mrsool Egypt, which has 140,000 couriers registered in its system, is one of the online platforms engaged in this initiative and supports all its components.

Mrsool’s Country Manager Karim Gamal told Ahram Online that the platform aims to increase its couriers to 1 million over five years, as the home delivery market in Egypt is growing significantly.

Courtesy of elluminati website.

“As an online platform that also focuses on developing home delivery applications, Mrsool is involved in the process as a focal point between the couriers and the application's users. Recently, these workers have called for social and insurance protection in the face of the risks they encounter on a daily basis. We support creating an entity to represent them, preserve their rights and govern their relationship with business owners and consumers,” said Gamal.

Mrsool provides technical assistance to couriers around the clock, gives bonuses for peak and non-peak times, and it is currently working on fresh business verticals to increase sales, so couriers can increase their monthly income, according to Gamal.

“We support establishing an entity to represent couriers and provide them with medical and social insurance, especially since they are not employees with signed contracts. In addition, this entity will be an important reference for companies themselves with regards to accountability, and can serve as a system that can tally the number of workers, easing the process of dealing with their needs and facilitating support from formal bodies,” Gamal explained.

Ahram Online also spoke to Chairman of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) Hassan Shehata on the issue of establishing a trade union for these kinds of non-organised workers.

Shehata said that such a move would be complicated and that the ETUF is not the body concerned with taking such a measure.

“According to the law governing trade unions, home delivery men can submit a request to the ETUF signed by at least 50 of them to establish an administrative committee that could grow in the future into a trade union committee, then into a trade union representing them in their dealings with business owners and governmental bodies,” Shehata explained.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO), through its office in Egypt, is also working on a comprehensive project to support non-organised workers in Egypt with a focus on the home delivery market.

Mahmoud Agmean, an advocate before the Egyptian Court of Cassation and legal advisor for the ILO, told Ahram Online that this segment of workers lacks an organised legal structure within which to work.

“Companies use these couriers without a clear contractual relationship. This is a great shortcoming that needs to be dealt with, especially given the fact that the home delivery market is growing rapidly,” Agmean said.

Agmean explained that a similar crisis had previously faced workers who were seeking work abroad, since there was no legal framework governing the relationship between these workers and their prospective employers. However, the country’s Labour Law has since been amended with an entire chapter regulating this process.

A legal framework, together with establishing a trade union for them, will guarantee representation for home delivery workers in dealing with business owners as well as official bodies, he added.

The total number of non-organised workers in the country is between 1.5 million and 2 million, according to the latest figures published by the Ministry of Manpower and the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS).

The only available official number for organised labour is the total number of state employees, who are estimated at 6 million, according to CAPMAS.

Courtesy of Salaryexplorer website.

According to the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development, the informal economy represents 30 percent of the country's GDP of EGP 9.2 trillion for the current fiscal year.

Also, the latest economic census released by CAPMAS in 2021 puts the number of businesses in the informal sector at 2 million, which employ millions of workers.

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Fourth person 'cured' of HIV, but is a less risky cure in sight?

AFP , Thursday 28 Jul 2022

AIDS researchers announced on Wednesday that a fourth person has been "cured" of HIV, but the dangerous procedure for patients also battling cancer may be little comfort for the tens of millions living with the virus worldwide.

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The 66-year-old man, named the "City of Hope" patient after the Californian centre where he was treated, was declared in remission in the lead up to the International AIDS Conference, which begins in Montreal, Canada on Friday.

He is the second person to be announced cured this year, after researchers said in February that a US woman dubbed the New York patient had also gone into remission.

The City of Hope patient, like the Berlin and London patients before him, achieved lasting remission from the virus after a bone marrow transplant to treat cancer.

Another man, the Duesseldorf patient, has also previously been said to have reached remission, potentially bringing the number cured to five.

Jana Dickter, an infectious disease specialist at the City of Hope, told AFP that because the latest patient was the oldest yet to achieve remission, his success could be promising for older HIV sufferers who also have cancer.

Dickter is the lead author of research on the patient which was announced at a pre-conference in Montreal but has not been peer reviewed.

'I am beyond grateful'

"When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, like many others, I thought it was a death sentence," said the patient, who does not want to be identified.

"I never thought I would live to see the day that I no longer have HIV," he said in a City of Hope statement. "I am beyond grateful."

Dickter said the patient had told her of the stigma he experienced during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

"He saw many of his friends and loved ones become very ill and ultimately succumb to the disease," she said.

He had "full-blown AIDS" for a time, she said, but was part of early trials of antiretroviral therapy, which now allows many of the 38 million with HIV globally to live with the virus.

He had HIV for 31 years, longer than any previous patient who went into remission.

After being diagnosed with leukaemia, in 2019 he received a bone marrow transplant with stem cells from an unrelated donor with a rare mutation in which part of the CCR5 gene is missing, making people resistant to HIV.

He waited until getting vaccinated for Covid-19 in March 2021 to stop taking antiretrovirals, and has been in remission from both HIV and cancer since.

Reduced-intensity chemotherapy worked for the patient, potentially allowing older HIV patients with cancer to get the treatment, Dickter said.

But it is a complex procedure with serious side effects and "isn't a suitable option for most people with HIV", she added.

Steven Deeks, an HIV expert at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the research, said the "first thing you do in a bone marrow transplant is you destroy your own immune system temporarily".

"You would never do this if you didn't have cancer," he told AFP.

'Holy Grail'

Also announced at the AIDS conference was research about a 59-year-old Spanish woman with HIV who has maintained an undetectable viral load for 15 years despite stopping antiretroviral therapy.

Sharon Lewin, president-elect of the International AIDS Society which convenes the conference, said that it was not quite the same as the City of Hope patient, because the virus remained at a very low level.

"A cure remains the Holy Grail of HIV research," Lewin said.

"We have seen a handful of individual cure cases before and the two presented today provide continued hope for people living with HIV and inspiration for the scientific community."

She also pointed to a "truly exciting development" towards identifying HIV in an individual cell, which is "a bit like finding a needle in a haystack".

Deeks, an author of the new research also presented at the conference, said it was an "unprecedented deep dive into the biology of the infected cell".

The researchers identified that a cell with HIV has several particular characteristics.

It can proliferate better than most, is hard to kill, and is both resilient and hard to detect, Deeks said.

"This is why HIV is a lifelong infection."

But he said that cases such as the City of Hope patient offered a potential roadmap towards a more broadly available cure, possibly using CRISPR gene-editing technology.

"I think that if you can get rid of HIV, and get rid of CCR5, the door by which HIV gets in, then you can cure someone," Deeks said.

"It's theoretically possible -- we're not there yet -- to give someone a shot in the arm that will deliver an enzyme that will go into the cells and knock out CCR5, and knock out the virus.

"But that's science fiction for now."

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100 French MPs slam Erdogan's 'policy of war' against Syrian Kurds

AFP , Saturday 30 Jul 2022

A hundred French parliamentarians, mainly from the political left, on Saturday denounced Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's "policy of war" against Kurds in northern Syria.

File Photo: A Turkish soldier walks next to a Turkish military vehicle during a joint US-Turkey patrol near Tel Abyad, Syria taken on September 8, 2019. REUTERS

 

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While the rest of the world is focussed on Ukraine, as Russia's war crimes multiply there, Erdogan is "planning to launch an umpteenth bloody offensive against the Kurds in northern Syria," the parliamentarians said in a statement published by the JDD title.

The Turkish president "is taking advantage" of Turkey's pivotal status, as a NATO member on good terms with both Moscow and Kyiv, "to obtain a blank cheque from the Atlantic Alliance in order to intensify his attacks in northern Syria", according to the statement initiated by Communist senator Laurence Cohen.

"Western countries must no longer look the other way", said the elected representatives, parliamentary deputies and upper house senators mostly from leftist and ecologist parties.

They were joined by some from the rightwing Republicans (LR) and President Emmanuel Macron's ruling party.

They called on the West "to guarantee the protection of Kurdish activists and associations present on European soil".

The signatories urged France to refer the matter to the UN Security Council "to declare a no-fly zone in northern Syria and place the Syrian Kurds under international protection".

They also called for the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) to "be granted international recognition".

Erdogan is threatening to launch a new military offensive against Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Syria, where he wants to establish a buffer zone 30 kilometres (20 miles) deep.

Turkey has launched a string of offensives in Syria in the past six years, most recently in 2019 when it conducted a broad air and ground assault against Kurdish militias after former US president Donald Trump withdrew American troops.

Erdogan has urged Russia and Iran to back his efforts, saying at a three-way summit last week that "we will continue our fight against terrorist organisations".

Egypt’s 70-year-old revolution

Hussein Haridy
Friday 29 Jul 2022

Egypt’s 23 July Revolution, 70 years old this month, was a watershed moment in shaping the destiny of the modern country

Millions of Egyptians awoke on Wednesday 23 July 1952 to hear the news over the radio – there was no TV in Egypt back then – that the army in a “blessed movement” had seized power in the country.

The intervention of the military in politics had come after a very turbulent period in modern Egyptian history immediately after the end of World War II that had included widespread demonstrations by students and workers against deteriorating living conditions, the Palestine War of 1948, the political instability of a regime that had started to lose control over events, and the inability of the palace and the governing elites to negotiate the end of the British occupation of Egypt dating back to 1882.

There was a fierce confrontation between Egypt’s leftists and the Muslim Brotherhood, which was scheming to seize power at the earliest possible opportunity through an ad-hoc alliance with the powers that be in order to change the status quo.

The majority parliamentary party, the Wafd, came to power in 1950 amidst rising national fervour against the British occupying forces. Under enormous political, economic, and social pressure, the Wafd government repealed the 1936 Treaty with the British, an act that triggered an armed resistance movement against British forces in the Suez Canal Zone where the largest British military base in the Middle East was located.

On 25 January 1952, the Egyptian police in Ismailia rejected a British ultimatum to lay down their arms. A bloody battle ensued in which dozens of Egyptian policemen lost their lives. On the following day, 26 January, Cairo burned for more than ten hours until the army belatedly intervened to regain control. Some 700 people died, and many Western institutions were ransacked and destroyed.

Many years later, I had the opportunity to discuss these events with Fouad Serageldin, the minister of the interior in the Wafd government at the time, who was a very influential politician and had occupied the post of the party’s secretary-general. I asked him who was responsible for setting Cairo ablaze. I still remember his reply that the responsible parties were the palace, the British, and the Muslim Brothers. The former two had done so in order to get rid of the Wafd government, he said, while the Muslim Brothers wanted to create chaos as a prelude to seizing power.

On the morning after the blaze, then King Farouk dissolved the 1950 parliament and appointed a new government. By July that year, Egypt had had three governments. The time for radical political, economic and social changes was long overdue.

In the two-year period from July 1952 to October 1954 the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) that took power on 23 July changed the course of Egyptian history. First, it enacted the agrarian reform law of 9 September 1952 limiting the amount of land that could be owned by individuals to 200 feddans and redistributing the rest to the peasantry. Second, it adopted a republican system of government in Egypt on 18 June 1953. Third, it signed a withdrawal agreement with the British in October 1954.

The leaders of the revolution wanted at first to concentrate their energies and the limited resources of the country on internal reform, with special attention being paid to developing and improving industrial production, public health, and education. They also wanted to modernise the Egyptian military through cooperation with the US.

The Americans were not very enthusiastic and promised rifles and machine guns. But that was not what the members of the RCC were thinking of. They wanted a modern army that could defend the country when some Western powers, France, for example, were providing Israel with modern tanks and fighter planes.

The parting of the ways between Egypt and the West came on 28 February 1955. At dawn on that day, an Israeli commando unit led by a then obscure major by the name of Ariel Sharon raided an Egyptian military outpost in Al-Arish killing almost 60 soldiers.

This was a turning point for the young revolutionary leaders led by Gamal Abdel-Nasser. The former Soviet Union entered the Middle East through Chinese mediation and agreed to provide Egypt with the weapons it needed. At the same time, Egypt launched the Non-Aligned Movement with the former Yugoslavia, India, Indonesia, China, and other developing countries at Bandung in Indonesia in April 1955. Cairo also recognised the People’s Republic of China, a decision that angered then US president Dwight Eisenhower.

Two major regional and international issues proved challenging for the revolution, namely Israel and the Cold War. The former sought to destabilise any Arab or regional power that threatened it, and the latter saw an ongoing confrontation between the US-led West and the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.

The July Revolution was a watershed moment in shaping the destiny of modern Egypt. It capped a 72-year-old national struggle for freedom in Egypt and in the conduct of its foreign relations. It was also a classic case of the relations between the military and society and of the complete identification of the two. This identification manifested itself again in the 2011 and 2013 Revolutions.

French journalist Jean Lacouture wrote a biography of Nasser that covered his thinking in the 1960s. He asked the Egyptian leader what his most enduring legacy would be. According to Lacouture, Nasser stayed silent for a moment and then repeated the famous slogan of the early days of the revolution: “Lift up your head, my brother, the age of colonialism has ended.”

Perhaps this was the most enduring legacy of the revolution for generations of Egyptians.

Hussein Haridy
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 28 July, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.

The House of Mohamed Ali — (5) The fall

Tarek Osman
Friday 29 Jul 2022

King Farouk, the last reigning monarch of the House of Mohamed Ali, left Egypt forever almost exactly 70 years ago.

The fall of King Farouk was not a surprise. British archives show that perceptive Egypt-observers at the British foreign office, as well as at the US State Department, had foreseen Farouk’s end.

It was a sad story. His patriotism and smartness could not subdue the insecurity and pain that had tormented him for years. He left Egypt, like his grandfather Ismail 70 years before him, for an exile that although it glittered with pleasure extinguished in him the spark of life. He died away from his country and family after a night of heavy dining at the age of 45.

But was the drama of one man’s life the cause of the fall of a house that for over a century was by far the most powerful, stable, and sophisticated of the region’s royal families? Destiny does not always make the right men kings, as a famous quotation from the novel the Prisoner of Zenda goes.

Perhaps some men (and women) are born to fail, and through their failure they fulfil a destiny that transcends their own lives.

The House of Mohamed Ali, as discussed in the previous article in this series, had reached major heights, and its achievements had placed it at the pinnacle of any serious history of royalty in the wider Middle East. But seeds of destruction had been laid down within its rule, and these had spread, growing over the years into poisonous weeds.

Failing to truly belong to Egypt was the first of these. Mohamed Ali created a modern state in Egypt, but it was a state for himself and his family. His son Ibrahim tried to develop that state into an empire. But that also was by and for the family.

The question of belonging – of whether the Mohamed Ali state was truly Egyptian – came to the fore in the aftermath of Ismail’s project for the country, the subject of the third article in this series. The emergence, rise, and growth of an Egyptian upper-middle class, well educated, able to engage with and lead the modernisation that was taking place in the country in the early 20th century, and with economic interests to protect and ambitions to grow, made the question of identity crucial.

The Mohamed Ali Dynasty failed to find an answer to that question. From the time of Mohamed Ali and up until that of King Fouad, King Farouk’s father, the family insisted on highlighting and anchoring its public image in its Albanian and Turkish origins and on a royal protocol devised from Ottoman as well as French and Italian models.

Even in terms of language, Arabic was almost utterly alien to the Egyptian royal court up until Farouk ascended to the throne in the mid-1930s, almost 120 years after the House of Mohamed Ali had come to rule Egypt.

Identity matters. It connects the ruler to the heritage of the land through a link that transcends utilitarianism and the mere accounting of the costs and benefits of any ruler’s record. This link signifies representation and the fact that the ruler is for and of the land and its history and culture that he rules. Failing to anchor its rule on some understanding of Egyptian identity created a subtle but growing legitimacy problem for the House of Mohamed Ali.

The problem was exacerbated in the period after World War I. The Ottoman Empire fell; US president Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of the right of all nations to self-determination found receptive ears in Egypt; and revolts in the Indian subcontinent against British rule became examples for rejecting colonialism in Egypt.

Powerful populist forces wanting to see Egypt’s independence from Britain built colossal constituencies in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s. Their message was anchored on a nationalist and secular identity that eschewed and often vehemently rejected Ottoman as well as Western affiliations. Amidst such tumultuous fights over Egyptian identity, the Mohamed Ali Dynasty offered nothing meaningful. It neither endorsed the independence movement nor attempted to provide its own definition of what Egyptian identity in a changing world was.

The acquiescence to foreign rule was partly to blame. The khedive Tawfik, Ismail’s son, is usually demonised in modern Egyptian history for seeking the support of Britain in the face of a rebellion by the armed forces against the political structure of the 1880s that strongly favoured foreigners in all walks of life. Tawfik’s decisions paved the way for the British occupation of Egypt.

But Tawfik was not the only ruler of the House of Mohamed Ali who sought Western protection against actual or potential insurrection against the family’s rule. On several occasions in the early 20th century, British heavy-handedness and the strong British military presence in the country ultimately guaranteed the family’s rule.

By the end of the 1940s, and as independence movements spread across the region, the family was widely perceived to be inextricably dependent upon the foreign domination of the country.

The fall of political liberalism in Egypt exacerbated an already simmering situation. Egypt was a key theatre of military operations in World War II, leading Britain to effectively take control of the country’s domestic politics. This marked the end of the liberal political experiment that flourished in Egypt in the period between World Wars I and II.

The collapse of liberalism coincided with the rise of a war economy accompanied by its classical effects of inflation, corruption, and rising inequality. The royal family and particularly King Farouk were among the financial beneficiaries of the blurring of money and power. Rather than rise to protect arguably the most valuable jewel of Egypt’s liberal age – real democracy, free representation, and the beginning of what could have evolved into true respect for human rights – Farouk and the most influential powers in the palace relished the return to a system in which the crown was the final arbiter of politics.

Yet, even in accumulating power and exercising it with increasingly few checks, Farouk was neither assertive nor decisive. He was hardly interested in politics; often equivocated; and surrounded himself with a group of corrupt yes-men. He lacked Mohamed Ali’s and Ibrahim’s ruthlessness and Ismail’s determination. Even in the face of clear dangers, such as when his secret police informed him early in 1952 that a group of officers was plotting to overthrow him, he procrastinated and failed to act decisively.

Egyptians detect weakness and disdain it. Many came to see Farouk as weak. By the early 1950s, he was shouldering the immense pain of successive personal tragedies. For most Egyptians, however, contempt for him trumped sympathy. When his yacht Al-Mahrousa, meaning “the protected,” a name historically used to designate Egypt, left Alexandria taking him into exile in Italy, scores of Egyptians took to the streets to celebrate the end of an era. The House of Mohamed Ali thus fell after 150 years of ruling Egypt.

Many young Egyptians today know very little about Mohamed Ali, Ibrahim, Ismail, Tawfik, Fouad, and Farouk, let alone other members of the former ruling family. But their history is important not only because, as an Egyptian saying goes, history in our country lives in every corner, but also because modern Egypt is to a large extent the product of the House of Mohamed Ali.

 

Tarek Osman

The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).

*A version of this article appears in print in the 28 July, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.

ZIONIST ETHNIC CLEANSING

Palestinian shot by Israeli army dies of wounds

AFP , Saturday 30 Jul 2022

A Palestinian, described as a suspect by the Israeli occupation army and as mentally disabled by his family, died Saturday four days after being shot by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint.

FILE PHOTO: Family members mourn over the flag-draped body of Amjad Nashaat Abu Alia, 16, who was killed a day earlier in clashes with Israeli security forces, during his funeral in the village of Al-Mughayer, east of the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, on July 30, 2022. AFP

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Hussein Qawariq, 59, from the village of Awarta, was shot on Tuesday by Israeli occupation forces manning a checkpoint in Huwara, near the West Bank city of Nablus, the Palestinian health ministry said.

The Israeli army told AFP that soldiers "spotted a suspect approaching them at a military post" and initially fired in the air after "receiving no response".

"The suspect continued approaching the soldiers who responded with fire toward him. A hit was identified," the army said.

Huwara mayor Wajih Odeh told AFP Qawariq was "mentally disabled". He "used to collect bottles and cans from the street and ask for money from businesses in the area", he said.

Qawariq's family too said he had a "mental disorder," Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. He succumbed to his wounds in the Rabin Medical Center in Israel, it added.

The occupation army said it was looking into the fatal shooting.

At least 54 Palestinians have been killed since late March, mostly in the occupied West Bank. They have included suspected militants and also non-combatants, among them Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American dual national, who was covering an Israeli raid in Jenin.

Attacks on Israeli targets have killed 19 people over the same period in attacks inside Israel. Three Israeli Arab attackers have also been killed