A number of workers at United Co. for Pharmacists (UCP), a leading drug distribution company, filed complaints with the Labor Office on Tuesday after the company cut about 50% from their February pay, failed to apply the minimum wage, and did not pay social insurance contributions despite deducting workers’ shares, two employees told Al Manassa.
The complaints mark the latest step in a long-running labor dispute at the company, where workers say conditions have steadily worsened over the past two years through repeated pay cuts, chronic salary delays, suspended medical benefits, and layoffs. Employees say the reductions have left them unable to cover basic household expenses.
One of the employees, who asked not to be named, said the company had routinely cut wages by 30% to 40% over the past two years, while also delaying salary payments by two or three months and disbursing them in installments. “Management was always promising things would get better, but the opposite kept happening,” he said.
The worker added that the company had transferred February salaries only to employees earning no more than 4,500 Egyptian pounds (about $86), and that even those payments were sharply reduced. “My salary is supposed to be 4,200 Egyptian pounds, but I only got 2,050 pounds, which is less than half. How are we supposed to live?” he said.
A second worker said employees had also been denied medical care because the company had stopped paying social insurance contributions since 2023, even though those amounts were still being deducted from salaries.
Sit-in by UCP workers at the Tamouh branch in Giza, Nov. 6, 2025The second worker added, “They’re robbing us in plain sight. It’s not enough that they ate up half our salaries, they also deduct our share of the insurance and put it in their own pockets. Where are we supposed to go? For more than a year we’ve been filing complaints with labor offices, the ministry, and the Cabinet, and nothing has come of it.”
In August last year, the company’s workers staged a protest outside its main branch in Dar El Salam to demand payment of overdue salaries and protest the continuing deductions from their wages. They later staged sit-ins at the Tamouh and Haram branches in November to protest a 40% wage cut, the dismissal of workers without payment of their dues, and the suspension of medical services.
Two workers at the company said at the time that they were struggling to cover their families’ needs and were sinking deeper into debt, including rent and basic utility bills, after salaries ranging from 4,000 to 5,000 pounds were cut in half.
UCP was founded in 1996 as an intermediary that obtains medicines and cosmetics from companies and factories and distributes them to pharmacies for a set profit margin. In 2021, it acquired the 19011 Pharmacies chain.
After the deal was completed, UCP fell into a severe financial crisis that left it unable to meet its financial obligations. A number of affected drug companies then moved to file a bankruptcy case against the company, seeking to freeze its operations and place it under a committee run by the Egyptian Drug Authority, the Health Ministry, and the Pharmacists Syndicate.
According to previous testimonies from several workers to Al Manassa, employees have since been subjected to systematic layoff plans under the pretext of financial distress, reducing the workforce across its branches nationwide from around 10,000 employees to less than half that number.
In the same bankruptcy case, the Cairo Economic Court ordered judicial supervision over the company in July 2025 and appointed a financial expert to monitor the restructuring plan it had submitted to avoid a bankruptcy declaration.
Then, in October, the Court ruled to keep in place precautionary measures imposed since February 9, 2025, which bar the company from disposing of its assets or carrying out financial transactions outside its normal business activity, while directing the same expert to continue overseeing their implementation.
