When the workhorse refuses the whip

A group of middle-aged men lie sprawled on the sidewalk outside a towering building in Egypt’s Nasr City, shading their faces with newspapers. For 15 days these oil and gas workers have been staging a sit-in, demanding that their petrochemical employer give back the jobs that they abruptly lost before their nation’s revolution. “We are demanding to return to our old work because we don’t have any other way to make money,” says protester Hamouda Mohammed. Back in downtown Cairo, Qasr Al Eini Street, lined with banks, hospitals and government buildings stretching south from Tahrir Square, has become ‘protesters’ row’. Since the uprising that swept the nation on January 25 and toppled President Hosni Mubarak in mid-February, teachers, lawyers, doctors and others can be found here most days, waving Egyptian flags and holding homemade posters, partaking in Egypt’s nationwide wave of labor strikes. Week after week, protests, sit-ins and strikes