Ten Years Without Resignation: The Cost of Leaving Egypt’s Transport Jobs

The transport minister’s ten-year ban on new recruits requesting resignation or extended leave did not surprise “Walid,” a pseudonym for a mechanical-engineering graduate. Seven years earlier, he had left a logistics job with a well-known agency at Port Said port to apply for Egyptian National Railways’ 2019 recruitment competition with three friends. After technical tests and before appointment, he was unexpectedly required to sign a five-year no-resignation or leave undertaking. Having already left his previous job, he felt unable to refuse.

Walid tells Zawia3 the condition was absent from the recruitment advertisement and paperwork instructions. At the Military Academy, where recruits underwent fitness, riding and lectures, an employee brought a contract and took away his phone to prevent photographs. The employee called it routine admission paperwork and refused him a copy.

Five years became ten in early July, when Transport Minister Kamel al-Wazir instructed ministry authorities, companies and affiliated bodies to prohibit new recruits from requesting resignation, transfer, secondment, temporary assignment or extended leave for ten actual working years after technical and technological training. The recruit and a parent or guarantor must undertake to repay three times testing and qualifying-training costs, plus sums paid during training, if the ten years are not completed.

The circular says the purpose is to preserve technical staff after unregulated recruitment within transport contributed to trained engineering, technical and administrative workers leaving for higher-paying employers, destabilising the workplace.

The ministry did not state how many workers left, their reasons or the nature of those competing offers. Instead, it imposed financial consequences for leaving, without a publicly detailed assessment of the underlying causes.

Although Walid and other railway employees say five-year undertakings had existed for years, the authority formally announced them only last year in Decision No. 6545 of 2025. Recruits must work for at least five years after training without private leave or secondment. Departure, resignation or dismissal requires the employee or guarantor to repay triple testing expenses plus qualifying-training wages, calculated with regard to completed service.

A railway union member confirmed that some freight and container subsidiaries require successful recruits to sign five-year commitments. Preparing technical staff can cost around EGP 300,000, he says, including tests, programmes, full board at the Wardan railway institute and pre-employment training.

Tripling that estimate produces EGP 900,000, before any additional training remuneration—not an established charge for every individual. Such sums approach a million pounds and can be unaffordable for people who sought secure employment.

Zawia3 asked the Transport Ministry’s media adviser why the ten-year restrictions and triple-cost repayment were imposed. No response arrived before publication.

Walid joined the 2019 competition for 150 third-grade engineering posts across Cairo and the governorates, covering mechanical, electrical, communications, civil, electronics and architecture specialisms. He hoped permanent government employment would bring benefits; instead, he describes an arrangement that bound him to his employer.

A posting that departed from the advertisement

The recruitment advertisement required permanent residence in the area applied for, recorded on the national ID. Walid says that requirement was not reflected in deployment: in 2020 he was assigned as an operations engineer in the East Delta, Zagazig, rather than his home governorate, Port Said.

His repeated objections cited roughly five hours’ round-trip travel alongside long shifts and inadequate rest. He says he was told, “Your place is in the East Delta; follow your deployment there.” He spent a year moving between sites, working and undertaking further suitability training without once receiving a salary, while supporting a wife and two children.

After training, he says he was assigned simultaneously to Port Said and Suez, far apart and difficult for a newly appointed engineer unfamiliar with the work. A normal team would include a section head, engineer, operations supervisor and shunting workers, but understaffing left him covering both governorates. He says he endured five years without receiving leave, including for occasions.

The Cabinet had allowed extensions of secondment and unpaid leave for work abroad, subject to competent-authority approval within fifteen days, and the transport minister later approved unpaid leave after a 2021 ban. Yet Walid says his application to work abroad last year was rejected despite his completing the five-year undertaking and seeking one year’s leave.

He says he obtained signatures from every relevant level, up to the central-administration head, but his and another colleague’s applications stalled without explanation. Rather than approval, he received a transfer to the infrastructure sector.

He lost an overseas opportunity offering much higher pay than his railway salary of under EGP 10,000, from which he says significant amounts were deducted for universal health insurance and roughly a third for taxes. Those deductions are his account, rather than a verified payslip breakdown.

The transfer also changed his occupation from freight and container logistics to inspecting tracks, points, signalling blocks and faults affecting train movement, requiring retraining from the beginning. He says he paid EGP 100,000 in contractual costs and, after five years and a refused leave request, decided never to return to the railway.

Walid says his cohort faced similar restrictions and some left after colleagues were referred to military prosecutors for ordinary work errors. He says he himself faced an allegation of embezzling EGP 10. One colleague paid more than EGP 40,000 for clearance after three years. These incidents are recounted by the interviewed worker.

He rejects compulsory training as justification for preventing departure: “They say these exercises cost money. What does that have to do with us? Did anyone ask them to train us? The employer made it a condition—how can the worker be charged for it?”

A penalty he cannot afford

“Kyrillos,” also a pseudonym, says the recruitment office told him leaving early would cost EGP 130,000. Unable to pay, he could not resign to accept a substantially better offer. His EGP 6,000 salary includes EGP 1,500 a month spent on commuting.

Before studying at the Higher Institute of Transport Technology, the railway’s Wardan institute, he signed conditions requiring five continuous years with the railway or its subsidiaries without leave or resignation. Continuous service was a core admission condition, he says, and non-compliance would require restarting the application process.

After institute study, tests and appointment to a subsidiary, he found a different workplace from the authority itself: salaries arrived later and tax deductions increased pressure. His principal concern is that early resignation is accepted only after a penalty is paid, whose value he says is determined case by case rather than clearly fixed.

He puts current salaries at EGP 6,000–6,500 including incentives, with increases and allowances under the applicable system, insufficient for rising prices. The report cites July 2026 annual urban inflation of 14.9% and transport inflation of 21.1%. Interviewed workers earned EGP 6,000–10,000.

Kyrillos believes retirements and staff shortages may motivate retention measures, but employment should be an opportunity, not a commitment that is prohibitively difficult to leave.

Speaking on Al-Hekaya in March, Kamel al-Wazir put railway staffing at 34,000, compared with 40,000 previously and 52,000 in 2012–13. He said wages had tripled, average monthly pay reached EGP 10,000 and the annual wage bill was around EGP 4.8 billion.

Source: minister’s March 2026 television remarks. Decline from 52,000 to 34,000: 18,000, or approximately 34.6%.

Staff losses and structural problems

Mohamed Ali, former dean of international transport and logistics, attributes the ten-year decision to accumulated administrative and structural problems. A government hiring freeze lasting more than fifteen years allowed many workers to retire without replacement, creating shortages of skilled personnel.

Rising inflation and wages that fail to keep pace encourage technical workers to move elsewhere in Egypt or abroad, he says. Continuing that pattern threatens efficient operation as staffing shrinks, leaving, in his words, “those who cannot find a better opportunity outside government work.”

Ali believes policies supporting forced work to stop employees accepting better offers will worsen the crisis and accelerate departures from other government technical sectors, customs and taxation, damaging public-service efficiency and quality.

He calls instead for careful workforce planning, improved income and incentives, reopening recruitment opportunities, attracting talent, transferring expertise to younger generations and retraining current staff to sustain competent public services.

A disputed, imposed condition

Aziza al-Tawil, a lawyer with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, considers the ten-year ban unlawful. She says constitutional work protections operate through the Civil Service Law in public administration and labour legislation for private and business-sector employment, with non-waivable worker rights and legally recognised forms of leave.

She describes cancellation of leave rights—ordinary, emergency, maternity, childcare, sickness, travel or pilgrimage—as illegitimate and potentially forced labour. The precise employment regime and leave category matter in an individual dispute; the circular’s stated restriction concerns extended leave, not an expressly published cancellation of every type of leave.

Article 12 of the Constitution protects work and restricts compulsory work to legally prescribed public service for a limited period and fair remuneration. Article 13 protects workers’ rights and prohibits arbitrary dismissal. Internationally, the report invokes ILO Forced Labour Convention No. 29 of 1930.

Al-Tawil says workers may seek resignation subject to lawful notice so their absence does not disrupt operations. She argues the new instructions conflict with established legal protections governing employment, working time and leave.

The instructions will harm thousands of employees unable to afford triple training costs and other expenses, she says, preventing unpaid-leave or resignation requests through a coercive financial relationship that disregards constitutional rights.

She believes employees can challenge the instructions in court under the applicable labour or civil-service framework. She considers the required undertaking an imposed contract condition, saying a signature does not necessarily indicate freely given acceptance. Her expectation that courts would uphold a challenge is a legal opinion, not a guaranteed outcome.

The Civil Service Law also has limits: Article 56 prohibits paid or unpaid work for another party during leave without competent-authority permission, with loss of pay for the leave period as the stated consequence.

Walid ultimately left after his overseas leave was refused despite completing five years; Kyrillos stayed because he feared the penalty quoted by recruitment, or an even larger demand.

A new cohort now faces ten years, while questions remain about previous cohorts: have affected workers challenged these decisions, and did fear of financial demands deter them? More broadly, can transport retain skilled people through better alternatives rather than making the cost of departure so high that workers cannot exercise their rights?