Focusing on the industrial and urban milieu in modern Egypt, I challenge the validity of class as a social category to study social hierarchy among individuals and groups in daily life. I suggest that organic concepts such satr, literally and metaphorically means cover, as vague as it is, better capturing how industrial workers, and urban populations in general, understood their social positionality. Based on intensive archival research on one of the largest industrial compounds in modern Egypt, I argue that the concepts of working and middle class fell short from capturing the lived reality of daily life. Among the urban populations, boundaries based on socioeconomic status could be blurred and contradicted respectability based on reputation, visibility, and origin. On the other hand, industrial workers experienced rigid hierarchy based on their skills, positions, and origins. Although they were among the industrial workers, foremen and supervisors did not equate their positionality with blue-collar workers and aspired to be grouped with the afandiyya. Divisions among workers and their individual strategies for survival were ingrained in their daily life more than the drive for a collective movement based on working-class solidarity.