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Shura annuls the minimum wage reduction
31-5-2017
The State Shura Council issued a decision on April 26 repealing an earlier decree to reduce the minimum wage to LBP 26000 instead of LBP 30000. In June 2016, the cabinet had ratified the amendment of a decree in 2012 (which set the official daily wage of workers and employees at LBP 30,000, as advised by then labor minister, Dr. Charbel Nahas), to become LBP 26,000, under then labor minister Sajaan Azzi. The latter’s decision, it should be noted, reportedly came to correct an alleged mathematical error made in 2012 in calculating the month and days ( http://www.lkdg.org/ar/node/15416). In a summary of the Shura Council decision, it said that it came to refute labor ministry ‘computational error’ justifications issued at the time, and to stress that the cabinet’s decision not in favour of the marginalized working classes and which reduced their minimum daily wage without any legal or realistic explanation of the reduction, particularly amidst an enlarged cost of living index, constitutes as viewed by the Shura Council, a contradiction of the principles derived from the Constitution and the relevant international conventions. The new decision comes in response to two revisions filed to the Shura Council requesting repeal of the said decree. The first was submitted by the National Federation of Worker and Employee Unions in Lebanon (FENASOL), and the second from president of Lebanon’s Public Drivers of Land Transport Union, Abel Amir Najdeh. Najdeh clarified that determining the official minimum wage is not a “discretionary action by the government, but is mandated in relation to the cost of living index, and is based on studies and tables of the cost of living fluctuations.” The decision to reduce the workers' daily wage, Najdi noted, was a manipulation by specific governmental departments and independent institutions that accommodate large numbers of daily wage-earners who are subject to the labor law. On the subject, the Federation’s president, Castro Abdallah, said yesterday that the Shura Council’s decision did justice to the workers and to the daily workers in Lebanon against the arbitrary measures stipulated by the former government and which, in fact, have become a trademark of the successive governments irresponsible towards and oblivious of the interests of the working classes. Abdallah was speaking during a press conference held with the participation of Citizens within a State movement and the Legal Agenda. (Al Akhbar, L’Orient Le Jour, May 31, 2017)
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