NOTE: This is NOT an article or journalism. This is my personal testimony outlining my experience while working at DNE.

UPDATE 11/5/2012:  On May 10, about a day after this blog was posted, the investors finally agreed to pay forward DNE editorial staff their April salaries. However, the lawsuit regarding workers’ compensation which we filed at Egypt’s labor office is still ongoing and we have no intention of revoking it.

The publication I’ve worked for over the past year, owned by Egyptian Media Services, a joint company which launched Daily News Egypt, not only decided to shut down without considering the legal rights of its employees, but investors are now also withholding the April salaries of just the editorial staff.

Although the investors have tried to justify their illegal decision to withhold our salaries by alleging that we have withheld from them passwords to DNE’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, the real issue here is that they are angered and surprised  that we have pursued a law suit against them through the Egyptian labor office in an attempt  to retrieve our rights.

Not only have the investors brought the newspaper to the ground with poor management skills and a failed business model over the past years, but they have failed to provide their employees with their most basic rights. According to Egypt’s labor office, they have also illegally began a liquidation process without informing us as a staff in order to avoid their legal obligations towards their employees. Investors at EMS include Taher Helmy, partner at Baker & Mckenzie and former Amcham chairman, Ahmed Badrawy, SODIC business development director,  Hamza ElKhouli, Farid Saad, Gilbert and Reda Gargour of Lecico.

In its seven years as an English paper in Egypt, DNE staff members have dedicated five to six years to building the publication from scratch with very limited resources. They’ve been patient with the investors’ shortcomings, remaining intact when they had every right to stage a strike and walk out. The editors would remain and even provide the investors with several business models to reshape the paper so it could hopefully one day reach its full potential.

But, what I witnessed over the past year was humiliation and disrespect as an employee and human being. I watched my fellow colleagues who were journalists and editors that I respected and looked up to also suffer. The investors have dealt with us like slaves. People who read DNE would assume that we were working with a full staff. We barely had 10 full time staff members (4 reporters & 6 editors), a meager budget for freelancers, and one marketing representative responsible for an ENTIRE newspaper in Egypt.

The company, of course, did not cover our phone bills or health benefits. In fact, many of us, after working with the company for years, were shocked to find out that we were not even provided with the minimum social insurance that we were promised in our initial contracts. Yet, we were expected to cover violence during an ongoing revolution. And we did. We covered everything that we could, often feeling disheartened that we could not cover the country to our fullest potential. But we did it everyday anyway, remaining steadfast.

We listened with disgust and surprise as our executive board member, Mr. Ahmed Badrawy, who is ironically a business development manager at SODIC, expected us as journalists to get involved in the marketing of the paper. In one of his last meetings with the staff, he asked us to “plump” up the paper so he could sell it to potential buyers in a last attempt to save it from closure. In fact, as journalists, Mr. Badrawy told us we too are responsible for “monetizing” the paper. Not only did he expect journalists to work overtime and cover an entire country, but he expected them to step out of their ethical boundaries and market the paper, something that was his job as a business developer to undertake.

In the same meeting, a month before the paper was shut down, we were told by Mr. Badrawy that when the company closed we would have no rights outstanding, despite the labor law which obliges company owners to settle with their employees if the company goes out of business. Legally, each employee has the right to 2 months of salary for every year they dedicated to the company. However, they not only wanted to deprive us of those rights, we were also not paid our salaries for the month of April, despite a signed document which stated that when the company closes on April 22, 2012 that all employees are to be paid their salaries in full on April 30, 2012.

The issue here is not just about a few journalists who often put their life on the line and ended up with no appreciation in the end. For years the DNE editorial staff remained silent, patient, and loyal to their posts as journalist, avoiding to become the “story” themselves. The issue here is about workers’ rights.

Ironically, a staff that has covered the rights of others for years as the only independent English Daily in Egypt is now being denied their most basic rights.

If Mr. Badrawy and his fellow partners do this with a staff of journalists well connected to the media and educated enough to understand the law in order to be able to fight for their rights, then how do they handle the legal rights of other employees in their other investments, who may not have the will or the tools to do the same?

For more on the story behind the investors of DNE in Arabic, click here.