Strike!

An AUC Administrator addressing the protesters at my school on Wednesday.

Just to expand on that last tweet a little bit: the strikes going on at AUC are mostly being carried out by janitorial staff who are contractually promised almost like 50% more pay than they actually receive and whose contracts also allow for them to be fired without warning and without any justification. I'd been watching the strike happen the past two days as they were coagulating in front of my building that is across from the Administrative building, but I hadn't known all the details elaborated until I read this very good article about it. (In the interest of full disclosure [actually I'm just bragging] I pretty regularly hang out with the author of that article, but it is really concise and informative.) Quite a lot of students had been amassing in support of the workers (500 according to the article), and apparently they've even been helping to feed the protesting workers. The protest was a lot bigger yesterday than it was on Wednesday, its first day. (The picture in this picture and the next are of the protest on each day from different vantage points, but you can still kind of see the increase in the crowd.)

Unfortunately, the AUC students supporting the janitors have not thought to try and be less slobbish around the campus without anyone cleaning up after them, so the campus turned into a wasteland astoundingly fast. Not that I am against these particular Egyptian janitors having jobs (and sustainable ones at that), I have often found myself thinking that if Egyptians just tried harder to do things themselves or more efficiently, there would be no need for so many superfluous jobs or for the bureaucratic mess that constitutes most processes here. I see these unnecessary jobs in the 5 security guards who stand and watch while 1 checks the bags of every student entering the dorm even where there is a big line, or when you pay someone at a food stand to get a ticket to give to a guy to get a bag of chips that was actually just right next to the guy who you paid.

Besides the excess of jobs thing, there are aspects of this accountability thing that I have noticed with a lot of Egyptians. I want to devote a whole post to it some time, but basically it's that I've observed a lot of Egyptians offended that someone else is not fixing their problems for them. The low-hanging fruit of the examples of this is how no one makes an effort to keep places clean simply by cleaning up after themselves, but I've picked up on this whole thing a little bit in some of the political discussions I've had with Egyptians. More about this later maybe.

Egyptian students in heated discussion with an administrator utilizing the classic Egyptian fingers-together-plaintive/disgusted-wrist flick.

Anyway, besides the fact that these workers get paid so appallingly little to do the shittiest jobs, the best/most interesting/saddest thing in the whole article is at the end when it talks about the AUC Administration's disdainful reaction:

"Around 1pm on Thursday, an administration official appeared, preceded by a group of security officers who cleared students and workers out of his way. The official announced that the administration would set up a meeting with some of the workers and that the administration would consider a raise in a semester, but would take away the benefits the university currently provides. The official also reportedly told a student that the administration would let the “spoiled students” sit in the sun until they were bored and got over the “fad.” "

...Yeah, I find that frustrating. I'll keep you updated on any twists in this whole story line. I'm waiting to see if that administrator ends up being right about the spoiled AUC students...and also to see if they start picking up their trash after they're done eating. In the meanwhile, I'll be bringing toilet paper to school with me since there are no janitors to replenish them on campus!

P.S. On a tangentially related linguistic note that I find totally fascinating, the word for "Strike" in Arabic is a modification implying greater causation/action of the word for "hit," which is weirdly like the way it is in English! If you think about it--and I hadn't until yesterday--it doesn't really make sense in English that the word for boycott of your work is called a "Strike," i.e. a more intensive kind of hit, so it seems kind of remarkable that the same weird connection would exist in Arabic too. There must be some shared linguistic genetics in that! Perhaps that doesn't interest any of you non-Arabic students, but it sure interested me.