The trade union committee representing journalists at Al-Wafd, the newspaper of one of Egypt's oldest political parties, has called for the removal of its chief executive, Sherif Hamouda, after a dispute over new attendance rules escalated into a standoff with party leadership over the right to strike.
Al-Wafd traces its roots to the party founded during Egypt’s 1919 uprising against British occupation. Revived in 1978 as the New Wafd Party, it today positions itself as a liberal, centre-right opposition party, and its newspaper remains the country’s oldest partisan outlet.
The clash began on July 14, when Sherif Hamouda issued an administrative order barring staff from leaving the premises during working hours unless on a reporting assignment. The order also required employees’ fingerprint-scanned attendance records to be cross-checked against surveillance camera footage and obliged journalists to check in at the newsroom every two hours.
The measures angered journalists, who said the rules were incompatible with the nature of reporting work. In response, the paper’s union committee, a workplace body representing Al-Wafd’s staff, met on Sunday to hear employees' grievances.
Committee chairman Mohamed Agamy told Al Manassa that the meeting called for “urgent intervention” by El-Sayed El-Badawi, who is the Party’s chairman and head of the newspaper’s board, to resolve the crisis and dismiss Hamouda.
Agamy said the meeting reviewed years of tension inside the institution, which he said has faced repeated crises over the past three years. Journalists rejected the new attendance order, he said, and some called for legal action against Hamouda, including a possible lawsuit.
Moreover, staff accused the CEO of running smear campaigns against them on social media over what they described as arbitrary administrative decisions unsuited to journalistic work, Agamy said, adding that employees intended to pursue their rights through legal channels.
Hours before the committee’s meeting, Al-Wafd Party’s Higher Committee issued a statement saying that preserving Al-Wafd newspaper “creates a legal and moral obligation to confront practices that threaten its stability or harm its economic and professional interests.”
The statement said that demanding rights is constitutionally and legally protected but must be exercised without disrupting work or harming the institution. It warned that legal and disciplinary measures permitted under labor law could be taken against those it described as “instigators of unlawful strike action.”
It also pointed to the labor law, noting that it allows the termination of open-ended employment contracts under certain conditions, stressing that management would not allow “freedom to be turned into chaos or rights into a means of pressuring the institution.”
The newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Yasser Shoura, told Al Manassa that the dispute is now being discussed directly with El-Badawi, who plans to meet with newspaper staff and the party’s executive bureau to hear proposals for resolving it. Shoura said he hoped the meeting would produce a solution that avoids “liquidation, dismissals, or any measures of that kind.”
Shoura also said the party is working to cut overall expenses by half, but stressed this “does not mean reducing contracts or cutting the number of journalists, but rather reducing overall expenditures.”
Under the party’s structure, only its chairman has the authority to dismiss the newspaper’s CEO, Shoura added. He said the editorial board is relaying journalists’ demands to senior management and hopes “calm will prevail and that we can reach common ground.”
