protests erupting over pay

The BBC reports HERE.

The protests that ultimately toppled Mubarak were about basic political freedoms. While they enjoyed broad support in many parts of society, they were in some sense led by liberally educated and cosmopolitan young Egyptians of the sort who use Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Blackberry devices. (It was symbolically appropriate that Wael Ghonim is a Google executive and AUC graduate).

But in the final days of the Mubarak era, we saw a first wave of strikes, which included political strikes by doctors and lawyers (and even the Artists’ Guild), but also a first hint of economically-motivated strikes. My suspicion, as supported by the BBC story linked to above, is that we’ll start to see this revolution turn into more of a large-scale class protest with demands for wage hikes and prince controls on the basic necessities of life.

If such protests occur, they’ll have much justice on their side. The country has become quite unlivable in economic terms for the lowest classes and even the working class. Just today I heard an Egyptian Army General say (in person) that those riot police earn a mere 400 Egyptian Pounds per month (around $68). In return, they are expected to work 12-hour and sometimes 14-hour days. This is why there was apparently a shooting at the Interior Ministry yesterday, of the workplace violence sort rather than the political sort. It’s barely enough to survive on, let alone get married and raise a family on.

This is surely the biggest challenge facing whoever takes over this country, with all its great promise: how to get the lower classes back on the grid of basically livable lives. They’ve been slipping off that grid over the past 5-7 years.

I’m expecting large strikes and wage protests, and I’m afraid the army may not react to these incidents with as tender a touch as they sometimes showed against Tahrir. Witness yesterday’s statement warning those who try to create “chaos and disorder.”