One year on: Workers remain the weakest link in Egypt’s new Labor Law
Where are the rights the President promised?
Only days after Labor Law No. 14 of 2025 came into force on Sept. 1, 2025, Nile Linen Group was confronted with an unprecedented human and labor tragedy. An infant girl died in the arms of her mother, Doaa Mohamed, after management refused to let her leave the workplace to take her sick child to hospital. Forced to remain inside the factory for three hours, Doaa watched as little Celia’s heart stopped before they were even allowed to leave the premises.
Four months earlier, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi had been boasting of a “qualitative leap in the path of labor rights” as he introduced the new statute during Labor Day celebrations at the Suez Steel Company on May 3, 2025. The government even launched a media campaign, led by former labor minister Mohamed Gobran, to showcase the law’s perceived improvements. Gobran went as far as to describe the statute as “the president’s gift to workers on Labor Day.”
The Nile Linen Group incident was not merely the product of management overreach. It was a blatant violation of the new labor law
Even critics concede that the law contains some positive provisions, most notably the formal recognition of vulnerable labor categories that had languished for decades outside the umbrella of legal protection. Yet, these merits did not shield the executive decrees issued in its wake from a barrage of criticism.
The president’s so-called “gift” to workers has been brought down to earth and tested on the shop floor. A year after its ratification, the question remains: Has the law passed that test, or has it run up against the structural realities of labor relations, where workers remain the weaker party?
Discrimination against mothers in the workplace
The Nile Linen Group incident went beyond management overreach. It was a clear violation of Egypt's new labor law. A mother was forced to report to work despite her daughter's illness, fearing the loss of her cost-of-living allowance. She was then denied her legal right to emergency leave under Article 128. Workers told Al Manassa the company also failed to post regulations on women's employment as required by Article 59 — yet another violation.
This was no isolated case of employers’ intransigence toward working mothers. In January 2026, management at Akay Garments in Port Said summarily dismissed nine female workers. Testimonies to Al Manassa cited the reason as bluntly discriminatory: the women were “incapable of staying late beyond official working hours.”
One dismissed worker told Al Manassa she felt persecuted after returning from maternity leave, noting “nitpicking from the manager over every little thing. Even during pregnancy, I felt they wanted to drive me out.”
Another worker still at the company told Al Manassa the women face near-daily forced overtime, up to 12 straight hours, even when pregnant or fresh from maternity leave. These practices flout Article 54, banning overtime for pregnant women or new mothers in the six months after birth, and Article 117, capping shifts at eight hours daily and 48 weekly.
“While overtime can sometimes be an advantage… what actually happens is that it turns into a permanent pattern,” labor researcher Hassan Barbary told Al Manassa. “Workers are forced into overtime to save the cost of hiring new staff, at the expense of their health and family stability.”
Layoffs and forced resignations
In February 2026, management at the Turkish-Egyptian clothing manufacturer T&C forced two workers to resign. Their offense was participating in a strike at the end of the previous month. The leverage employed was a familiar instrument of labor discipline: the threat of a referral to the National Security Agency on charges of sabotage and incitement to disrupt work.
The same happened again in March 2026, when management demanded that 30 male and female workers on annual contracts, some of whom had spent five years at the company, submit resignations on the pretext of negligence. Under pressure, some accepted severance for their remaining contract period but received no compensation for their previous years of service, a company told Al Manassa.
The general coordinator of the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services believes that the law itself has contributed to an increase in layoffs
The law’s provisions have proven unable to protect workers from forced resignations, even though one of the advantages the government touted was the abolition of Form 6—the pre-signed resignation form employers had routinely used as a tool for arbitrary dismissal. Article 167 of the new law stipulated that resignations be approved by the “relevant administrative authority,” yet Ministerial Decree No. 187 of 2025 effectively gutted the article.
Decree 187 allowed contracts to be terminated “by agreement and mutual consent” without the safeguards stipulated in Article 167. A February 2026 petition by political parties and labor unions called this “a dangerous loophole that reproduces practices workers have complained of for years.”
Kamal Abbas, the general coordinator of the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services, told Al Manassa that the legal text is meaningless as long as security threats and salary withholding remain viable options for employers.
The law has actually accelerated dismissals, Abbas argues. “Article 156, for instance, grants employers and workers the same right to terminate open-ended contracts, ignoring the inherent power imbalance, while Article 87 permits fixed-term contracts to be terminated without restrictions, making this type of contract the rule rather than the exception,” he explains.
In continued violation of the law’s provisions, incidents of dismissal and mass layoffs of workers have recurred over the past few months. In December 2025, Oriental Weavers fired 70 workers after sham investigations over their participation in a Facebook group where they discussed working conditions inside the company. In March, Egyptalum, the country’s sole aluminum producer, laid off over 500 workers on temporary contracts. The dismissal followed a sit-in and strike for permanent status and the minimum wage, a protest that was only resolved once it was forcibly dispersed.
The battle over the minimum wage
The minimum wage remains the central demand in most labor protests, from factories and commercial businesses to service workplaces, including Al Ahly Sports Club and the newsrooms Al-Wafd and Al-Bawaba News. This is despite the new labor law imposing harsher fines—ranging from 1,000 Egyptian pounds (about $19) to a maximum of 20,000 pounds ($380)—on employers that fail to comply.
While some protests succeeded in obtaining the minimum wage, workers at most companies were forced to end their protests either after promises that were never fulfilled or under threats of dismissal and imprisonment.
Wage data shows why the demand remains so urgent. In 15 of the 20 sectors covered by CAPMAS’ monthly statistical bulletin for March 2026, daily wages in the fourth quarter of 2025 ranged from 175.9 to 269.3 pounds (about $3.35 to $5.13). At those rates, most workers remain below the monthly minimum wage of 7,000 pounds ($133).
Barbary maintained that private-sector employers will not apply the minimum wage as long as enforcement is absent and the state continues to side with business owners. “Despite the Labor Ministry’s many statements about inspecting thousands of establishments and filing reports against those violating the minimum wage decision, we have not seen a single lawsuit filed by the ministry against the owners of those establishments,” he said. The rare lawsuits that are filed come on the basis of complaints submitted by workers, as in the case of Al-Bawaba News journalists.
On April 20, the North Giza Labor Misdemeanors Court fined Abdelrahim Ali, chairman of the board of Al-Bawaba News, 13,000 pounds (about $248) for each of the paper’s 257 journalists and workers, a total of 3,341,000 pounds (about $63,600), for refusing to apply the minimum wage, after the paper’s workers filed a complaint with the Dokki labor office, which referred it to the court.
Barbary, however, doubts other workers can replicate what the Al-Bawaba journalists achieved, especially in the private sector. “Workers who complain risk retaliation, pressure to withdraw their complaints, and even dismissal. Protecting them is the labor ministry's responsibility, but it appears unwilling to act out of deference to business owners,” he said.
The labor researcher also points to what he calls the “government’s failure” to form the National Wages Council, in violation of Article 102 of the 2025 law. As a result, no minimum wage decision has been issued for private-sector workers, even as the wage floor is set to take effect for government employees in July 2026.
New working patterns and informal labor
In theory, the new Labor Law included some positive provisions on irregular workers—Egypt’s legal category for workers in informal or intermittent employment. It expanded the categories covered, created a special fund for them, and recognized new work arrangements, such as remote work and digital platform workers. But in Abbas’ view, those provisions remain largely symbolic and lack implementation mechanisms, as no executive decisions have been issued so far.
The law recognized digital platform workers without providing any real safeguards to protect them
Barbary also doubts the state’s ability to inspect digital labor platforms or force them to issue contracts. “Labor directorates have neither the tools nor the staff for that. For all the ministry’s statements, we have yet to hear of a single inspection, contract review, or check on compliance with the minimum wage,” he said.
Agriculture is no better. The sector accounted for 18.7% of Egypt’s workforce in the 2024 Labor Force Survey and remains one of the economy’s biggest reservoirs of informal labor.
Conditions there are among the worst, marked by layered exploitation, especially of women and children. Poverty forces them into workdays that can stretch to 15 hours, including the round-trip commute in dilapidated, overcrowded vehicles, all for a few dozen pounds.
“Does the government know anything about them, about their meager wages or their working conditions? Does it pay any heed to the dozens of those whose lives are lost on the roads? And have the law’s executive decisions established mechanisms capable of protecting them?” Abbas asked.
Abbas and Barbary agree that despite its positive provisions, the new law has had no meaningful impact on workers’ conditions. They blame not only weak enforcement mechanisms but also the feebleness—or outright absence—of unions, particularly in the private sector. That feebleness, they argue, stems from suffocated union freedoms, deliberate efforts to “sabotage” independent unions, and security interference in union elections.
Abbas points to the 2022–2026 electoral cycle: the National Security Agency excluded dozens of candidates; authorities obstructed the Independent Trade Union of Suez Canal Clubs Workers; and the management of Universal Home Appliance fired every member of the company’s independent union committee.
And so, a year after the president ratified a law that was supposed to deliver justice to workers, they are still fighting for their most basic rights, while victims of layoffs and arbitrary dismissals struggle, in vain, to find alternative work.