HYD celebrates May Day

BEIRUT - Alternative Staff

May 2005

Labor union figure Adib Abou-Habib said that during their dominance of Lebanon, the Syrians realized the influence of the General Labor Confederation (GLC) on the nation’s sociopolitical life and consequently worked to undermine it.

Abou-Habib’s comments came during the weekly seminar of the Democratic Left Movement (DLM), known by its Arabic acronym HYD, held at the movement’s headquarters on Friday April 29.

Abou-Habib started his lecture by highlighting the history of the world’s labor movement. “In 1886, American labor unions called for a demonstration on May 1 to call for the shortening of working hours,” he said. “American police at the time shot at these worker demonstrators and arrested, and even hanged, a number of them.”

Therefore, Abou Habib argued, “a meeting of workers from around the world declared May 1 as the Labor Day. In 1970, Lebanon celebrated May 1 for the first time.” The first labor union in Lebanon, he added, was the Union of Printers’ Workers. “The Lebanese leftists contributed to its formation.”

Abou-Habib then detailed the Lebanese rules and regulations governing the formation of labor unions saying that before 1946, workers could form their labor groups by providing the authorities with the Note of Information in accordance with the Ottoman 1909 Law of Associations and Parties.

In 1946, parliament passed the current Labor Law, which forced labor unions to request a license. The new law led to the dissolving of all existing unions at the time. “Like always, the Lebanese authority gave licenses to its protégé groups only, yet workers started to join these unions and through elections, took their organizations back from the hands of the authority.”

The year 1949 saw the beginning of the Cold War and the division of the labor movement worldwide which led to the division of the Lebanese labor confederation into two main factions: “The leftist World Unions Confederation and the liberal Free Labor Union.”

This division came to an end, however, in 1970 when the two groups were re-unified under the name of the General Labor Confederation (GLC). Despite the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, the confederation remained united under the banner of common sociopolitical demands.

The labor union reached its climax in 1987 when labor demonstrations on both sides of the divided Lebanon protested the ongoing war and called for “the elimination of bunkers between West and East Beirut.”

The unity was short-lived, however, with the surge in Syrian influence in post-1990 Lebanon. “The Syrians realized the power of the GLC and consequently employed a series of measures to bring this labor movement to its heels,” according to Abou-Habib.

For this purpose, “the Syrians appointed a Baathist Labor Minister, Abdullah Amin,” who was succeeded by the pro-Syria Syrian Social Nationalist Party’s (SSNP), Assaad Hardan, then came pro-Syrian Amal Movement’s Michel Moussa and finally SSNP’s Ali Qanso. The pro-Syrian ministers issued decrees “allowing their ministry to meddle in the affairs of labor unions.”

Abou-Habib said that the GLC became a confederation in which small unions were granted similar voting rights as large unions. “This gave the government the ability to control the GLC through granting licenses to some very small loyalist unions, such as the so-called union of the Workers of Paper, and thus pro-government unions had more votes inside the GLC’s 37-member Executive Committee.”

A debate about the future of the labor movement among the present HYD members then ensued. The members expressed the need that HYD drafts a labor platform coupled with a proposal for the restructuring of the GLC from a confederation into a federation granting member unions proportional representation.

HYD members said the labor membership and the role of the unions should be re-defined HYD’s Secretary-General Elias Atallah then responded to a question of “how to put forward a labor platform at the time HYD’s membership has a relatively small number of laborers” by saying that HYD’s duty was “to bring the labor problem to the attention of the public through the media.”

HYD supporters were also invited to join their respective labor unions “even if these unions were dominated by some political parties,” while these supporters were promised that workshops will be held for those interested in understanding the labor movement. The congregation came to a consensus that HYD should issue a statement on the occasion of May 1 in which it should “unveil the problem of labor unions.”