Pharmaceutical Workers in Cairo Strike Over Unpaid Entitlements and Forced Resignations
Labor dispatch!
Workers at Amoun Pharmaceutical Company S.A.E. in Cairo have gone on strike over delayed financial entitlements and a pattern of forced resignations, demanding intervention by labor authorities and a written, time-bound commitment from the company’s senior leadership before they can end their strike.
The company, which is a subsidiary of the UAE’s tax-exempt ADQ, reported sales of approximately EGP 6.2 billion, placing it among the top-performing firms in the Egyptian pharmaceutical market. Yet these record figures have not been reflected in workers’ wages or working conditions. Instead, they have coincided with arbitrary management practices that have led workers to lose all confidence in the management’s promises. Workers are now demanding direct intervention and a binding official letter from senior leadership to guarantee implementation of their demands according to a clear timetable and specified percentages
The demands include launching an immediate and transparent investigation into the delayed and unpaid entitlements; guaranteeing payment of overdue financial rights; and taking legal measures against any practices that violate workers’ rights.
The demands also include removing the company’s general manager, Mohamed Heshmat, from his position; adjusting salaries in line with the cost of living and to achieve greater wage equality; paying the delayed annual raise retroactively at a rate of no less than 30%; and disbursing 2025 profits on a clear and transparent date—not as a discretionary bonus, but as a right linked to workers’ contribution to production.
Workers also called for a review of delayed and postponed promotions, an increase in the production incentive in line with actual production rates, the immediate application of the minimum wage, and the conversion of outsourced contracts to direct employment. They also demanded that the status of open-ended and temporary contracts be reviewed and converted into permanent contracts.
The demands also addressed shift allowances and overtime. Workers called for an increase in overtime wages and the introduction of fairer risk allowances and incentives. They also called for controls to prevent supervisors from imposing deductions that exceed the legally or procedurally established limits.
Among the most structurally significant demands is the review of recent resignations. Workers said that resignations have been obtained through direct or indirect pressure—administrative restriction, threat, or coercion—converting a voluntary right into a tool for bypassing legal protections. The practice has allowed the company to reduce headcount and suppress collective organization without triggering the procedural requirements of formal dismissal.
Those who drafted the demands linked the dispersal of the sit-in and the end of their strike to the issuance of an official statement containing a clear timetable for implementing the decisions. The statement, they said, must include a specified annual raise for workers and employees; an immediate cost-of-living adjustment mechanism whenever prices rise; linking incentives to actual production; and acknowledging workers’ right to profit distributions and promotions according to publicly announced timeframes.
The crisis is another in a pattern of recurring contradictions across various industrial and non-industrial sectors amid successive waves of inflation and rising cost of living. The demand to link wages and incentives to production and the cost of living, therefore, expresses an attempt to recover a minimum degree of justice within an employment relationship tilted in favor of management and capital.
No official response has been issued by the company’s management so far.