BEIRUT: With shouts of congratulations filling the air, politicians, officials and contract workers celebrated the end of the four-month strike at Electricite du Liban’s headquarters – but the actual content of the long-awaited deal remained obscured.
At a news conference at his office, Energy Minister Arthur Nazarian with Agriculture Minister Akram Chehayeb announced Friday morning that the monthslong crisis was finally over thanks to a deal brokered by Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt.
It took Nazarian and Chehayeb one minute to deliver the good news. They added a few comments but refused to give any details.
“We will read one text that we have prepared with the contract workers in order to avoid any mistakes,” Chehayeb said before leaving the room to head to EDL’s headquarters in Mar Mikhael. “This is an agreement and we want to be speaking on behalf of both sides.”
Their words signaled the end of four months of strikes, protests and unrest due to heavy disagreements over how many of some 1,700 eligible longtime contract staff should be given full-time employment with the state electricity company, allowing them to access basic benefits that they have so far been deprived of.
In response to Parliament law 287/2014, which stipulated that EDL had to come up with a firm figure of exactly how many employees it needed, the company said it would only give 897 contract workers full-time jobs, leaving around 800 others out in the cold.
Previously day laborers for EDL, the workers in question were given temporary contracts in 2012 when former Energy Minister Gebran Bassil hired three private companies to manage the struggling electricity sector. Prior to this at EDL, the workers received barely any employment benefits, and were deprived of social security perks, paid leave or a fixed salary, a situation they refused to return to when their private service contracts end in 2016.
But there was no official word on what exactly has changed with the Jumblatt-negotiated agreement between Speaker Nabih Berri, who backed the workers, and Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun, who supported the state electricity company’s administration.
And what initially appeared to simply be a preoccupation with the formalities of the event soon transpired to be an agreement between all actors to keep the silence. None of EDL’s executives, the ministers or the workers revealed full details about what had been agreed upon, apparently with the aim of allowing all parties to save face.
“There was a decision not to make anyone look victorious or defeated,” a union leader told his colleagues in a closed meeting after the big press talk.
But behind closed doors, it seems that the state company will use a wave of upcoming retirements to employ the 800 workers previously excluded from the deal.
All the contract workers will sit the compulsory Civil Service Council exam, with 897 successful candidates chosen for full-time employment at EDL before June 2015. A further 120 will be chosen to replace current EDL staff who will have reached the retirement age by then.
“The test will be only pro forma,” then union leader told his fellow workers, implying that everyone who sat the exam would pass regardless of their score, adding that while those with degrees would be given priority, all workers would eventually be employed.
“The political parties signed a deal stating that two years from now, all those eligible among us would be working inside EDL,” he said in the closed meeting.
“There will be a mechanism to employ the other workers gradually, as many other EDL employees are expected to retire,” another representative for the workers told The Daily Star.
At EDL’s headquarters, tents that have been there for months were cleared away and the contract workers held a news conference of their own to announce the end of their protest movement.
Hundreds of workers gathered at EDL to celebrate the news, exchanging hugs and greetings each other with tears of joy.
The building’s yellow gate was freed of its chains, and workers opened it minutes before the arrival of the ministers and officials. Inside, the building’s main door was decorated with balloons, and shouts of congratulations filled the air.
EDL’s employees were clearly happy to be getting back into their offices after such a long break, with some of them making jokes about a box of grapes in an office that had shriveled to raisins. During the strike, the company’s main operations room was temporarily transferred to the Zouk Mikael power plant and employees were scattered in other locations.
The committee responsible for drafting the agreement, according to Chehayeb, included him, Berri’s adviser Ali Hamdan and Aoun’s adviser Cesar Abu Khalil.
“Electricity does not have any sectarian or partisan color,” Chehayeb said at both news conferences at the Energy Ministry and EDL, thanking Berri for his “blessing” and Aoun for his “support.”
After the ministers, workers and journalists left, EDL’s board of directors held a meeting and released a statement calling on all their employees to resume work at the headquarters as of Saturday.
The statement said EDL would comb all the facility’s offices to check if any equipment showed any signs of damage or if anything was missing, particularly documents.
The company assured the public that customers would not have to pay all the bills accumulated during the four months in one go. Instead, Hayek explained, they would be requested to pay the bills for the first two missing months during December, and the other two in January.
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