Public sector employees [in Lebanon] slammed over the weekend a reform plan passed alongside the salary scale increases last month.
“We will not allow them to implement the destructive and malicious reform plan that targets public sector employees,” Mahmoud Haydar, head of the Public Sector Employees Association, said at a lecture organized by the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.
“The Union Coordination Committee will remain united and will force them to cancel the plan and anything that can affect public employees negatively,” he said.
Haydar said the circumstances for Lebanese public sector employees had deteriorated consistently since the 1990s. “The situation is unbearable on all levels whether regarding wages, buildings, administrative structures or equipment,” he said.
The UCC, a coalition of teachers and public sector employees, suspended a five-week-long strike last month after Cabinet agreed to pass the controversial salary scale bill to Parliament.
The new salary scale draft would be tied to an increase in working hours of civil servants and a tax hike on luxury goods. Working hours for the public sector would be extended to 5 p.m. as opposed to 2 p.m., and Saturdays would become a day off.
The draft law would also allow the government to reposition civil servants currently appointed in overstaffed departments to understaffed ones.
