Farfahinne

First, the Opposition have used the General Labor Confederation’s call for a general strike for it’s own purposes. It instrumentalised the workers’ socio-economic demands to create political pressure on its rivals in the government.The leadership of the union is allowing itself to be coopted by the political designs of the Opposition. Indeed, as soon as they were on the ground, the “protesters” forgot all about demands of the workers.

On the other hand, the government has recklessly implemented plans for its own interest, mostly congruent with the US vision for the “new Middle East”. Its leaders have presided over the collapse of the Lebanese state structure, where its institutions have been virtually paralyzed and its self-serving, sectarian parliamentarians have made the parliament a moribund and irrelevant institution. In the sectarian system that it has reinforced, the government talks about electoral majorities and minorities as if it were a secular system without democratically adhering to the political and demographic realities of Lebanon.

Attac Lubnan saw the general strike as a critical opportunity for all workers in Lebanon to pressure the government to increase the minimum wage and redress key needs of the country’s citizenry, increasingly forced to live in conditions of poverty, malnourishment and economic, political and social insecurity in a time of a global “economic tsunami”.

click on the poster bellow to read the full statement issued by Attac