In the early morning hours, Ahmed Harb (32 years old) stands among his fellow delivery workers on the pavement outside a well-known foul and taameya shop in Bab El-Khalq, astride his motorbike, waiting for the “order” so that he can carry it to its owner and collect the delivery fee: a figure ranging between EGP 10 and EGP 20 that it never exceeds under any circumstances, since each trip is calculated by distance, as he says.
For more than four years, Harb has worked in food shops as a “delivery” worker; and when he is asked about the guarantees or benefits his employer gives him, he smiles sarcastically, then adds that he bought the motorbike itself in instalments, while he receives nothing but the delivery fee. This is how he describes his situation, with expressive fluency.
A short distance away, after leaving Bab El-Khalq and crossing Qalaa Street, passing through Helmeya El-Gedida, a group of “fawa’leya” labourers is stationed at the end of the street on the Sultan Hassan side, leaning against the wall of the mosque, waiting for a vehicle to carry them and their equipment to a new residential resort north-west of Cairo in El Salam City.
Ahmed El-Hels (45 years old) says that the daily wage he and his colleagues receive is not fixed in amount, but rather “depends on the agreement according to the work required”, as he describes it, pointing out that the “fawa’leya” are paid only daily or weekly, and sometimes “by the job”, that is, after the work has been completed in full, which mostly does not exceed a few hours, while a working day may stretch to ten continuous hours, paid no more than EGP 500.
Near that area, half an hour away on foot, stands Rabab Mohsen (28 years old), who works for a services company on Metro Line 3, on a fixed eight-hour daily “shift”, her task being to evacuate passengers by the lift.
Rabab remains standing on her feet for the entire eight hours in a job that does not require it. One female passenger suggests to her: “Why don’t you bring a chair to sit on?”, and she replies quickly and without equivocation: “Not allowed.” The woman embraces her and kisses her head, then quietly leaves.
The labour market in Egypt receives about 1.3 million young men and women every year, while the available job opportunities do not exceed half a million jobs; although reaching full employment of young people could raise gross domestic product by 36%, and although the private sector provides about 75% of this output and absorbs about 80% of the workforce, its potential remains constrained by structural obstacles.
The tourism sector led growth during the 2024-2025 fiscal year at a rate of 17.3%, which helped attract 17.4 million tourists against about 15 million in 2023-2024; non-petroleum manufacturing industries achieved growth of 14.7%, and the growth rate of the communications and information technology sector rose to 13.8%, with a 180% jump in the number of its companies to reach 186 companies, while transport achieved growth of 7%, electricity 5.3%, and construction and building 4.1%.
Official data show the unemployment rate in Egypt falling to 6% during the first quarter of 2026, after it had been 6.2% at the end of 2025, with the labour force rising to 35.4 million people; however, the number of unemployed reached about 2.13 million, of whom 1.01 million were male and 1.12 million female, while the number of employed rose to 33.3 million, of whom those working for a cash wage made up about 23 million. The agriculture and fishing sector retained its position as the largest employer of labour with about 5.98 million people, followed by the wholesale and retail trade sector with about 5.69 million, then manufacturing industries with about 4.87 million, then construction and building with about 3.83 million, and transport and storage with about 2.89 million.
Private-sector employment data, however, reveal shifts that call for scrutiny: the number of female workers rose from about 2.2 million women in 2022 to 7.2 million in 2023, an increase of more than 220% in a single year, while the number of males fell from 10.2 million to 6.8 million. Although total private employment rose by only about 1.6 million workers, this sharp shift in the distribution between the sexes points to a possible reclassification or a change in the methodology for calculating the data, especially as these jumps are not consistent with other indicators concerning women’s participation in the Egyptian labour market.
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The “Employsome” platform estimates the average monthly wage in the private sector at about EGP 18,500 in 2026, against about EGP 8,500 for those working in the government and informal sectors: a wide gap between wage levels, headed by the oil and gas, financial services and technology sectors as the highest-paying activities, while the retail, hospitality and education sectors languish at the bottom.
According to the latest data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), the average monthly wage of workers in the public and private sectors stood at EGP 6,336 in 2024: EGP 14,660 for the public sector against EGP 5,796 for the private sector. The average wage of males reached EGP 6,523 a month against EGP 5,529 for females, while the average wage of males in the public sector reached EGP 14,540 against EGP 5,998 in the private sector, and females recorded EGP 15,206 in the public sector against EGP 4,928 in the private sector. Financial intermediation and insurance topped the list of the highest-paying activities with an average of EGP 19,897 a month, followed by electricity and gas with EGP 14,994, then communications with about EGP 12,897, then mining and quarrying with EGP 12,091, then construction and building with about EGP 10,773; meanwhile, average monthly working hours reached 187 hours in the public sector and 221 hours in the private sector.
The head of the Capital Centre for Economic Research, Dr Khaled El-Shafei, tells Zawia3 that the mega-projects relied heavily on subcontractors and day labourers, a temporary and irregular workforce, explaining that the decline in the overall unemployment figure hides behind it a huge proportion of precarious employment lacking job security, insurance and continuity.
He adds that government, foreign and domestic investments pumped in liquidity and provided millions of job opportunities in recent years, but he describes them as “painkillers”, since they absorbed part of the graduates and the workforce as the demand for jobs rises every year as a result of population growth.
El-Shafei believes that these investments absorbed millions of returnees from abroad and new graduates, preventing unemployment rates from jumping to catastrophic figures, but they failed to turn that boom into permanent jobs with health and social insurance; preparing the ground to attract productive investments in the future was accompanied by a decline in real wages and an inability to keep pace with the speed of inflation, and consequently jobs increased in a “precarious” way, and “working poverty” increased with them, because they relied on rentier or service sectors at the expense of exports and manufacturing.
Data for 2025 reveal that unemployment in Egypt does not exceed 2.7% among those aged between 40 and 49, while it rises to 17.4% in the 20-24 age group; illiterate people also recorded an unemployment rate of 1.9% in 2025, against 12.6% for university graduates and 11.3% for holders of secondary school certificates, with growing reliance on the informal labour market.
For his part, the head of the Economic and Social Rights Unit at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Wael Gamal, tells Zawia3 that the unemployment rate alone is not enough to measure the growth of the labour market, explaining the importance of the “labour force participation rate”, which hovers at only about 45% of all those able to work, a level he describes as “low”, as it reflects human energies outside the market because of frustration with searching for an opportunity or giving up the search altogether.
The Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics had announced that the rate of participation in economic activity reached about 47.6% of all those aged over 15, according to its latest statistics.
Wael Gamal adds that sectors such as construction and contracting, wholesale and retail trade, and delivery create new jobs, but they are “temporary or precarious”, lacking stability, insurance and basic rights, which makes them unable to provide decent living standards; he notes that workers in foreign investment projects achieve higher productivity rates than their counterparts in domestic sectors, without that increase being reflected in their wages or incomes.
He continues that the decline in the unemployment rate does not reflect a substantive improvement in the economy’s capacity to create job opportunities, describing growth over the past years as “not job-generating”, since output growth rates exceeded the pace of new job creation, especially as domestic and foreign investments are concentrated in sectors of low labour intensity, such as financial services, technology and renewable energy.
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Economist Dr Mostafa Badra tells Zawia3 that the decline in the unemployment rate is a direct indicator of increased employment rates, since the labour market is not limited to formal jobs, but extends to those working in the informal or parallel economy, where labour is temporary and irregular, explaining that this provides sources of income for broad segments even if they do not enjoy stability or remain outside the formal system.
Badra acknowledges that wages have still been unable to keep up with the rises in inflation in recent years despite the multiplicity of investments, but these investments have boosted employment and reduced unemployment; and while he admits that the gap between price growth and the increase in incomes remains an obstacle for the Egyptian economy, he believes that expanding the employment base, even below the minimum wage, is better than unemployment.
Wael Gamal disagrees with him, pointing out that international economic evidence does not support the claim that raising the minimum wage increases unemployment, and that several applied studies have shown that improving wages does not have a negative impact on employment rates, as is commonly claimed; rather, the opposite is true.
He explains that every billion dollars of foreign direct investment in Egypt has provided only about 1100 jobs, against an average of about 1600 jobs in the Middle East and about 2100 jobs in the organisation’s countries; but the problem, as he says, does not stop at the limited number of jobs created, but extends to their low quality, as a large proportion of them are temporary or unstable, with low wages and limited social protection, in addition to a broad segment suspended between the formal and informal economies.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had stated in a report that foreign investments in Egypt provided about 275,000 direct job opportunities during 2013-2023, against about 165,000 opportunities during 2003-2012, while every billion dollars of investment creates about 1100 jobs against an average of 1600 jobs regionally and 2100 jobs in the organisation’s countries.
For his part, Dr Khaled El-Shafei points out that successive waves of inflation and the decline in the currency’s purchasing power have made the wages provided by many of the new investments in the system of the Egyptian economy, especially in their early stages, unfair and insufficient to cover basic living costs, making the worker feel that he “works to stay poor”.
Minister of Labour Hassan Radad had pointed in statements to the political leadership’s keenness to continue applying international labour standards in practice through developing labour legislation, social dialogue and trade union freedoms, describing the Labour Law as “a practical model that reflects Egypt’s commitment to international labour standards”, and noting that it includes articles protecting workers’ rights that keep pace with changes in the labour market and new patterns of employment.
El-Shafei points out that investments in productive projects, industrial and agricultural ones and those intersecting with technology and modern agriculture, have not reached the momentum required to drive the economy, stressing that productive projects alone are what create high-quality and sustainable jobs that develop skills and provide better wages.
El-Shafei explains that temporary labour, such as day labourers and the “fawa’leya”, is included in the equation of declining unemployment according to local and international statistical methodologies, as a person is counted as “employed”, or not unemployed, if they engaged in any work that brought them an income during the week of the statistical survey, even if it was work for a single day.
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Under Egyptian Labour Law No. 14 of 2025, the relationship between the worker and the employer is regulated by setting working hours at a maximum of 48 hours a week, prohibiting overtime except with pay and compensation, and providing paid leave, with the worker entitled to additional pay ranging between 135% and 300% depending on the timing of the work, in addition to establishing an annual increment, obliging the employer to apply the minimum wage, establishing a special fund to protect and care for day labourers and craftsmen and to provide them with social protection, and prohibiting child labour.
According to experts, the new Labour Law of 2025 brought nothing new; rather, it came as an extension of the policies of business owners and investors at the expense of workers, especially with the decline in their living standards, the rise in poverty rates and the shrinking of their share of gross domestic product.
The report on violations of trade union freedoms issued by the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS) recorded the non-application of the minimum wage in about 32,500 cases, the absence of occupational health and safety requirements and health coverage in 16,200 cases, along with 13,200 cases of refusal to pay profit shares or their reduction, 11,900 cases of cancellation or delay of work allowances, 10,700 cases of threats of dismissal, 8,600 cases of forced leave, and 7,000 cases of threats to use the National Security agencies, which is the same number recorded for cases of workers being prevented from leaving factories; the report also documented 32 cases of restriction of liberty or detention of workers, while recorded work injuries in 2023 reached about 8,317 injuries (7,264 for males and 1,053 for females), with the private sector accounting for 52% of them.
Egypt’s ranking in the Global Rights Index issued by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) also places it on the list of the 10 worst countries for workers, as it falls in the fifth category (5), which means “no guarantee of rights”; this ranking indicates that in Egypt, despite its enactment of legislation for workers’ rights, workers have no effective access to these rights and face autocratic regimes and unfair labour practices. The index classified the Middle East and North Africa region as “the worst region in the world for workers” for the eleventh year in a row.
Wael Gamal explains that the law included references he describes as “positive” to categories not previously covered by legislation, such as those working through online platforms, but the problem lies in “the weakness of implementation and oversight mechanisms”, which limits these categories’ benefit from the advantages established by the law, limited as they are.
Dr Khaled El-Shafei, for his part, points out that the small and medium-sized companies generated by new investments in the Egyptian market avoid entering the formal system in order to evade the burdens of taxes and social insurance, and that the contracting and fast services sector has historically relied on supply chains of itinerant “tarahil” labour that are difficult to structure formally, noting that the worker himself may prefer to receive his full salary in “cash” rather than have part of it deducted for insurance or taxes.
El-Shafei describes the quality of job opportunities as “low to medium”, attributing this to a structural cause in the recent period, namely “contracting” as the main driver of employment in the real estate and infrastructure sectors, which are labour-intensive sectors that absorb unemployment, but are “temporary”, ending when the project ends, and do not generate sustainable added value after they become operational.
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According to Zawia3’s tracking of job advertisements in the new economic fields that are widespread on social media platforms, a large proportion of the advertisements contained no guarantee of the minimum monthly wage, nor social or medical insurance, let alone the number of hours required, or being made permanent with a legal contract; as for day labourers, talk of those guarantees is a luxury for them.
The most notable observation, according to Zawia3’s tracking of construction and building advertisements published by intermediaries working with contracting companies, is that they contain no insurance guarantees for the craftsmen or any commitment to the number of hours set by law, with the daily wage hovering around EGP 350 (about USD 6.5), and there are even daily wages lower than this amount.
Zawia3 analysed 66 posts on the walls of groups for recruiting day labourers in the construction sector on “Facebook” on 10 June this month, and found that housing was offered as a non-cash benefit in about 34.85% of the advertisements, and that 19.70% of them offered a free meal without stating what it consisted of, while advertisements that included transport did not exceed 7.58%; the analysis showed that ordinary labour accounted for the largest share of employment advertisements at 45.45%, followed by advertisements for reinforced-concrete carpenters at 22.73%, then steel fixers at 18.18%.
The daily wage ranged between EGP 250 and EGP 900 depending on the nature of the trade and the level of skill required; ordinary labourers recorded the lowest levels, while the daily wages of reinforced-concrete carpenters and steel fixers were higher. The data revealed that most of the advertisements with high wages were linked to specialised technical trades or to work sites outside the main residential blocs, such as the New Administrative Capital and El Alamein, reflecting the efforts of project owners to attract skilled labour and to compensate for the costs of transport or accommodation in some cases.
Khaled El-Shafei explains that calculating a fair wage requires a careful balance between the poverty line, the inflation rate and the basket of basic goods for an average family, pointing out that inflation levels between 2024 and 2026 pushed the government to raise the minimum wage to about EGP 7,000, an amount that barely covers the basic needs of food and drink for a small family, without counting housing, education or health care; he believes that moving income from the “subsistence level” to the “sufficiency level” for an urban family requires no less than EGP 10,000 a month, linked to annual inflation rates.
Mostafa Badra likewise believes that the fair level of wages in the current circumstances is EGP 10,000 a month, to match living costs and inflation rates, but he points to the difficulty of applying this level immediately because institutions and the private sector are unable to bear its cost, stressing that improving the citizen’s purchasing power is not linked to raising wages alone, but also requires lowering price levels and supporting social protection programmes to ensure an improvement in living standards and to ease the economic burdens on families.
Wael Gamal details that the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights estimated the minimum needed to cover the national poverty line at about EGP 8,964 a month per family, according to calculations of cumulative inflation, considering that raising the minimum wage to EGP 8,000 is still below the level sufficient to keep pace with living costs, and that the priority today should be the comprehensive application of the minimum wage before moving on to policies that vary it between sectors or geographical areas.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights had said in a statement that the national poverty line, calculated using the rates of price increases from January 2020 to February 2026, is estimated at about EGP 8,964 per family a month, while it estimated the extreme poverty line at about EGP 6,500 per family a month according to official cumulative inflation.
Wael Gamal points out that the crisis of applying the minimum wage is not linked to its value, but to the weakness of the scope of application and of oversight of implementation, noting that many sectors still rely on temporary labour, among them the education sector, which includes large numbers of teachers working on a per-class basis.
In conclusion, economic policies may reduce the unemployment rate to 6%, but the challenge lies not so much in the number of those working as in the nature of the work itself; statistical indicators may improve with temporary, low-paid jobs, without in any way guaranteeing an improvement in workers’ lives. And in the distance between the job and dignity, the question remains standing before the state: is it enough for Egyptians to work, or must they work in decent jobs?
The intermediary company Rabab works for deducts about 35% of her wage and the wages of her male and female colleagues under the heading of “contractual value” or “administrative costs”; her salary on paper is EGP 9,000, while she receives only EGP 5,900 “in her hand”.
The contractor guarantees El-Hels and his colleagues nothing but their daily wage and transport in a small pickup truck to their work site in the new compound, without any other benefits, so much so that they share the cost of their food out of their daily wages.
As for Ahmed Harb, he poses a question far removed from figures and economic indicators, but one that carries the concern of a broad class of Egyptians preoccupied with nothing but earning a living and who cannot afford the luxury of objecting: “Will I find work tomorrow or not?!”
