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The Ogero employees’ union will observe a second warning strike on Wednesday, April 3, and Thursday, April 4, within a week. It has granted the government “a deadline until April 15 to respond to all its salary demands, without exception.” These demands will be discussed at the next Council of Ministers meeting.
All Ogero centers and offices will be closed, and maintenance or repair work will be suspended.
The president of the Ogero employees’ union, Emilie Nassar, told This is Beirut that no initiatives or solutions have been proposed, despite numerous calls for improvement in employee compensation. This explains the union’s determination to continue the warning strikes. She emphasized that Ogero employees “have been making the same demands for a year.” “We are waiting until April 15, after the Fitr holiday, and if necessary, we will move to the next step,” said Nassar. Are we heading towards an open strike? “Not for now,” she replied.
The union is demanding salaries more suited to the economic situation and is lamenting the catastrophic conditions in which employees work. Their main demands include a revaluation of their salaries and benefits, as well as indexing them to the new dollar exchange rate, as their current salaries, given the pound’s devaluation, now represent only a very small percentage of their value before the crisis. Even the revaluation obtained last year, following the open strike on March 24, 2023, was removed from the budget for the 2024 fiscal year.
In the Cabinet
Caretaker Minister of Telecommunications Johnny Corm revealed to This Is Beirut that, during the next session of the Council of Ministers scheduled for Thursday, “the reinstatement of the salary revaluation for Ogero employees, granted last year and removed from the budget for the 2024 fiscal year, will be discussed outside the agenda.”
It is worth noting, in this context, that Ogero’s strike, in case of breakdowns, affects internet services throughout the country since the operator provides data to all access providers.
It is for this reason that the services of the mobile operator Alfa were disrupted last Wednesday during the previous warning strike. The Fatka central was shut down that day due to a generator problem, which disrupted the operations at the Alfa central located in Adma, and thus, the communications between users.
