BEIRUT: A long running long dispute between Electricite du Liban contract workers and their management which culminated into a four-month-long strike has been settled, head of the contract workers' committee said.
The deal will likely see the dismantling of tents set up at EDL’s Beirut headquarters where the striking workers have been camped out since August, preventing the state-run company’s administration from accessing the building.
“We have reached an agreement, and a press conference will be held tomorrow to announce it,” Lubnan Makhoul, the head of the contract workers' committee, told The Daily Star by phone Thursday.
“After the press conference, if everything goes as agreed upon, we will hold another conference to announce the end of our strike and to clear the company’s headquarters.”
The deal was brokered following weeks of negotiations brokered by Progressive Socialist Party leader and MP Walid Jumblatt, Makhoul said.
He declined to go into detail of the agreement, but said it respects the rights and responsibilities of both sides.
A source close to the EDL workers told The Daily Star that the company will not employee the nearly 2,000 striking contract workers who are demanding full-time employment, but only the 897 it had agreed to employee which sparked the strike.
The workers who do not get promoted to full-time positions will remain employed in private electricity company, and be short-listed for a shot at a full-time position when one opens, the source said.
More details should be announced at the 10 a.m. news conference Friday.
Walid Jumblatt has been engaged in the mediation for one and a half months,” Makhoul said. “He tasked [Agriculture] Minister Akram Chehayeb with following up on the matter.”
He explained that Chehayeb, a representative of EDL’s board, and a representative of former Energy Minister Gebran Bassil, will all be at the news conference Friday.
Makhoul said that all but a few details of the deal had been agreed upon by the two sides some time ago, but Chehayeb helped iron out the last bits.
“We only had some disagreements on certain details,” he said. “You know, the devil is in the details.”
The strike was launched after EDL during the first week of August announced that it would only hire as full-time employees 897 of the nearly 2,000 contract workers.
Before being employed by private service providers in 2012, most of the workers had worked for EDL for more than 10 years as day laborers, without fixed salaries, paid leaves or any significant employment benefits.
The workers’ key demand has been for EDL to hire all those eligible for full-time employment according to certain criteria.
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