BEIRUT: A day of dramatic protests over the ongoing Electricite du Liban contract workers dispute ended back at square one Monday, with strikers forcing one of the private companies involved to cancel several coercive measures but with no proper resolution in sight.
Frustrated with EDL’s lack of action in the face of a debilitating 40-day protest, two former contract workers for the state electricity company threatened to commit suicide during a protest Monday morning outside National Electrical Utility’s facility, with one of them cutting himself in front of reporters until he was covered in blood.
Another poured fuel over his own body and threatened to set himself on fire until his colleagues intervened.
Monday’s protest saw the strike move a few meters from the firm’s east Beirut headquarters to those of the NEU company, one of three service provider companies employing the demonstrating contract workers.
After years of no social security, paid vacation, or any other employment benefits under day labor contracts, the workers are demanding full-time employment at EDL either now or when their temporary jobs with the service providers expire in 2016.
The sit-in outside NEU was to voice the workers’ rejection of the company’s decision to give some of them only half of their August wages.
“We had called on our employees to sign a pledge stating that they will not violate the law in their future actions,” NEU’s CEO Carla Aoun told The Daily Star, “but many of them refused to sign.”
On Sept. 15, the company paid August’s salary in full to those who had signed the pledge. It paid half to those who had not signed and asked them to do so if they wanted the rest of their wage.
The workers were on strike for the whole of August, with none of them showing up for work.
“It was an act of good will from our side. We wanted to say that even though you didn’t sign, we are providing you with half the salary,” Aoun said. But the strikers refuted this assessment.
“We believe we have the right for our salary because our protest was legitimate, unless democracy has been eliminated in this country,” the workers’ union spokesman Ahmad Shoeib told The Daily Star.
Tensions were also stoked by rumors that NEU had fired five workers, three of whom were the leaders of the movement: Shoeib, Lubnan Makhoul and Bilal Bajou.
“They made the decision to fire us upon pressure by EDL,” Shoeib said.
But according to Aoun, the company only ever fired two of its employees, Fadi Wakim and Maroun Shahine, “because they attacked an executive at the company, who was threatened by one of them using a weapon.”
The three movement leaders had not been fired, she added, but had been moved from EDL’s facility to NEU’s main office, where they were given new responsibilities.
CEO Aoun admitted that the decision had been made at the request of EDL and was directly related to the protests.
A further condition, according to a memo sent by EDL to NEU last month, stipulated the three workers would be sacked if they stepped on the state company’s property.
“If NEU has already adopted the memo, then my presence now at EDL as we speak is itself enough of a reason for me to be sacked,” Bajou said by phone Monday morning.
But in a meeting Monday afternoon NEU agreed to suspend this clause until the contract worker matter had been resolved.
“We received a promise stating that we will not be sacked,” one of the leaders, Makhoul, told reporters.
NEU also agreed to pay all the workers their full salaries, regardless of whether or not they had signed the pledge.
Following the meeting, the workers moved back to the EDL headquarters, where they promised to continue their protest until a compromise with the administration has been reached.
The whole issue began when EDL issued a memo saying it would employ just 897 of nearly 1,800 contract workers as full-time employees, prompting uproar.
“We are hoping for an initiative by administration that would protect our basic rights and push us forward toward a solution,” Shoeib said.
As the conflict drags on without any sign of a solution, Beirut continues to experience intensive electricity rationing, with daily power cuts increasing from three to 12 hours a day.
This has resulted in a huge reliance on privately owned generators, with consumers receiving doubly large bills since August.
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