The 1995/1996 Household Income, Expenditure - (PDF, 101 mb ...

IV.12
have not kept pace with the costs of living. Just to keep median wages
constant over the time period, inflation would have had to grow no more than
5.15% per year; most people would agree that inflation has grown at least
twice that amount per year.
Because poverty is so prevalent in Egypt, and the poor are believed to
be living "hand to mouth," another wage comparison might be made for those
workers who are mainly resigned to accepting part-time, intermittent, hourly,
manual labor jobs.
Nominal and Real Comparison of Mean and Median Wages of "Day Laborers"
"Day Laborers,,9 1990/1991 1995/1996 1995/1996
(N=745) Nominal Real
(N=1030) (N=1030)
Mean Wages (£E) 2459.81 4094.18 2254.75
Median Wages (£E) 2190.00 3600.00 2060.23
The deterioration in real wages for manual laborers is less marked than for
agricultural workers. The implication is that hourly wages for manual laborers
are higher than expected, and persons who find such jobs can consider
themselves privileged compared with the rest of the population. Thus, manual
laborers do not properly represent "the poor."
IV.E Employment and Wages by Form of Ownership
Returning to the 1995/1996 data, wages and salaries are the largest
source of individual incomes, as shown in Table IV.2. While the categories for
"Type of Organization" are not mutually exclusive, they do encompass most
types of labor sector organization. Non-governmental organizations ("NGO")
and foreign joint ventures ("Foreign JV") are bound to be mostly private;
cooperatives and investment organizations can be public or private. The
difference between "public" and "government" organizations in Table IV.2
relates mainly to the occupation and economic activity of workers employed at
each: "government" is usually taken to mean civil servants working in one of
the ministries. Organizations or "authorities" more than 50% owned by the
government are considered "public sector." Of the 21,416 individuals who
provided information on the classification of their work organization, 25.8%
said they worked for the government, 7.6% said they worked for the public
sector, and 65.8% worked in the private sector.
One very interesting result is that private sector wages are the lowest
of any organization type! The word "private," in the context of the other
types of organizations, encompasses many types of individuals, from the street
hawker to the secretary in the oil company. "Private" also carries
connotations of "self-employment" more readily than any of the other
categories, and the self-employed are a similarly heterogeneous group.
9 Paul Mulligan of USAID/EAP suggested the term "day laborers,"
connoting more regularity than "casual laborers" in such occupations.