The Second Year of the Union - Part 3: The Historic Nasser-Chehab Meeting and the New Unified Labor Law

Friday, 19 March

Dr. Muhammad Midhat Namiq, an engineer from the Egyptian region, was seconded to the post of Secretary-General of the Ministry of Industry in Damascus, at a fixed salary of 1,150 Syrian lira, placing it among the very highest-paid posts in the state.

This secondment came at the request of the Minister of Industry, the engineer Wajih al-Samman, who had been chosen as a minister in the cabinet formed on 7 October 1958.

Wajih al-Samman was known for his competence and broad learning.

He was a graduate of the Ecole Centrale in Paris, before we ourselves went to study at its own university.

Even so, he began crying out in complaint against his own "Secretary-General," on the grounds that the man had stripped him of his own authority, leaving him nothing to do but "read Arsene Lupin novels" in his office.[1] This is what Akram al-Hourani told Mr. Mahmoud Riad, the President's advisor for the Syrian region. Mr. Riad continues:

"I hastened to remind Mr. al-Hourani that he himself had been the one demanding that the Minister of Industry in the Syrian region be an Egyptian, on the grounds that Syria had no government apparatus at all overseeing industry, and that a five-year plan for industry had been drawn up, and that it was his own view that Egyptian experts should take charge of the Ministry of Industry. I also reminded him that I had objected to this, so that it could not be said that Egypt had simply annexed Syria to itself, as Radio Baghdad kept repeating. And I reminded him of his own words, that the Syrian people's desire for union was stronger than any other sentiment."

From the moment we first came to know Dr. Midhat Namiq, in our meetings to discuss financing the industrial projects his own ministry was planning and carrying out, we realized he was a strong personality, determined to carry out the industrialization program in the best possible way, and so he took matters in hand with an iron grip, so as to be able to achieve what he had been tasked with.

It may well be that his very seriousness in his work stirred the hands of jealousy against him, and accusations of high-handedness. Today, President Abdel Nasser signed Decision 513, dated 19 March, concerning the organization of staff exchanges between the two regions.[2]

Officials in both regions took great interest in this decision.

Its first article provided as follows:

"An official assigned (to work in the other region) shall be entitled to the salary of the post as designated in 'that' region, along with its allowances and supplements, during the assignment, and shall in addition be granted the equivalent of his original salary, for a maximum period of three years. Should the period extend beyond that, he shall be granted the equivalent of half of that salary.

"He shall also be granted a travel allowance (relocation compensation) for one month from the start of the assignment."

This decision was followed by Decision No. 785, dated 30 April, which likewise provided that officials of the Northern Region seconded to work in the central ministries would retain their original salary, along with its allowances and supplements, and would be given, in addition, compensation equal to the salary of an equivalent post in the Southern Region.

An official seconded to either region thus came to hold two separate salaries at once, a considerable temptation for officials.

Mediation efforts, insistent pleas, and requests began raining down upon the heads of the regional ministers, urging them to approve the secondment of some of their own staff to the central ministries in Cairo, or to ministries corresponding to their own.

I found this kind of secondment to be an entirely natural thing. Were we not, after all, a single, unified state? What difference was there between transferring an official from Damascus to Aleppo and transferring him from Damascus to Cairo? Except that whoever was transferred to Cairo won, in effect, the Night of Destiny itself, since he would now draw two salaries, while whoever was transferred to Aleppo or Latakia would meet with hardship and ill regard, unless he was a native of the place and wished to settle there.

I do not know how many Egyptians were seconded to Syria, nor how many Syrians were seconded to Egypt, but what I do know is that I approved the secondment of a number of Syrians, while never once approving the secondment of an Egyptian to the Ministry of the Treasury, since malicious talk had already begun to spread about "Egyptian colonialism."

Wednesday, 25 March

A "historic" meeting took place today between Abdel Nasser and General Fouad Chehab, commander of the Lebanese army, under a tent set up on the Syrian-Lebanese border.

This general is remembered fondly, for he preserved the unity of this army and kept it neutral amid the slaughter of the armed militias, refusing, Maronite though he was himself, to throw it behind President Camille Chamoun, likewise a Maronite.

To bring the strife in Lebanon to an end, Abdel Nasser and America agreed to close the book on Chamoun, by not renewing his term, and to back Chehab's nomination for the presidency of the Republic instead. This meeting may well have served as a "get-acquainted session," with the United Arab Republic securing assurances that "Lebanon would be neither a base nor a corridor for colonialism," as the late Riad al-Solh had once proclaimed before all.

"Chamounist" Lebanon had been a hotbed of conspiracies and troubles for the United Arab Republic, and a source of anxiety for it, while the Republic, for its part, had been waging its own struggle against Chamoun and his Foreign Minister Charles Malik, a man overflowing with hatred for anything bearing the faintest trace of Arabism.

The journalist Mr. Fouad Matar once put a question to Mr. Mohamed Hassanein Heikal (editor-in-chief of al-Ahram in those days), asking why a tent on the Syrian-Lebanese border had been chosen for the meeting of the two presidents, rather than Damascus or Beirut, or even Chtaura or Bloudan, and what had passed between them in their private meeting. Heikal's answer was that he had heard from President Abdel Nasser, the moment he stepped out of the "tent," that he held General Chehab in the esteem his own moderate character deserved, and that the two of them had exchanged firm assurances on the level of relations between the two countries.

Abdel Nasser assured General Chehab that the United Arab Republic would be a support to Lebanon, and would never pose any danger to it, while Fouad Chehab promised him that he would never allow Lebanon to become a base for anyone seeking to sabotage or harm the United Arab Republic.

As for the choice of a tent on the border, Heikal noted that the years of tension that had prevailed between Syria, and then the United Arab Republic, and Lebanon, because of Chamoun's own policy of leaning toward the Baghdad Pact and opposing the liberationist policy Syria, and then the Arab Republic, was pursuing, made it impossible, at that time, to hold the meeting in either of the two capitals.[3]

Wednesday, 1 April (23 Ramadan 1378 AH)

Unexpectedly, the "official" radio broadcast a statement from the army command calling up the reserves, at eleven o'clock at night. What, one might ask, had happened? What had happened was that Israel had called up its own reserve forces, anticipating possible surprises along "its own borders," and we moved swiftly to respond in kind, to protect ourselves against any eventuality.

This was a legitimate precaution, but what is striking is that our Republic seems to attract a new enemy every single day. Last year, we resisted Saudi Arabia, because of King Saud's conspiracy to kill Abdel Nasser. We turned our attention to Lebanon, without success there. We set our hostility on the King of Jordan and "his mother Zein." Then the full measure of our anger fell upon "Iraq's Qasim," and we followed our hostility toward him with an attack on the Soviet Union and its leader, by name. On the world stage, we now find ourselves in fixed disagreement with both Turkey and the Shah of Iran.

Israel justified calling up its reserves by claiming that the Republic had seized, in the Suez Canal, the cargo of two ships carrying Israeli goods to the Far East, sailing under Panamanian and Greek flags.

Should Israel commit an act of aggression anywhere along our borders, every possibility would then become real.

To this day, Israel has remained silent in the face of certain insults heaped upon it, since it finds itself caught between the two jaws of a pincer, moving now at the command of a single leader, an uncomfortable position for it indeed.

I should note, finally, that Syrian public opinion tends to lay the blame for the Republic's tense external relations on the President's own advisors, al-Hourani and al-Sarraj especially, a charge I do not believe to be accurate, given what I know of the firmness of Abdel Nasser's own character.

But who knows? As the saying goes, a steady drop of water can, in time, bore through stone.

Thursday, 2 April

Some Lebanese newspapers carried the news of the killing of Dr. Abdul Jabbar Jomard, former Iraqi Foreign Minister, a native of Mosul and an opponent of the communists.

He had left the cabinet once Qasim and the communists seized power and drove Abdul Salam Arif from the country, and had retreated to his home in Mosul. The reports claimed that demonstrators had killed him in the street and mutilated his body.

This news struck me with terror, for he is a dear friend of mine, and my own companion from our studies at the University of Paris.

I wrote an elegy for him in an article for al-Wihda, the sole newspaper the Republic published in Damascus, in place of the once-thriving army of newspapers that individual professionals used to publish.

We then heard his own voice on Radio Baghdad, denying the news of his own death.

I thanked God for his safety.

I was later able to reach him by telephone at his home, and we spoke of those dark days, whose clouds finally lifted on the day Qasim was executed. But our joy at this did not last long, for news soon broke of the resignation of Faiq al-Samarrai, who had been Iraq's ambassador in Cairo, along with the resignation of two of the embassy's own advisors. Al-Samarrai's resignation caused a great stir across the Arab world, given the high standing he personally held among Arab nationalists, and the devastating effect this resignation had on relations between Nasser's government and Qasim's own.

Thursday, 2 April - Insurance for Workers Against Injuries

Here is another fresh breath of pure socialist doctrine.

Today, Decision No. 92, dated 6 April 1959, was issued, containing the Social Insurance Law. Its subject is insuring workers against workplace injuries.

It also covers agricultural workers operating mechanical equipment (Article 19), and insurance became mandatory for both employer and worker alike.

The employer must pay into the insurance fund 3 percent of his workers' wages as a monthly contribution. This fund is entitled to accept gifts and donations, and to invest whatever money it holds, so as to build up a surplus to cover the needs of injured workers, treatment costs and medicine, until they recover or their disability is confirmed.

Article 55 and following set out the terms of "old-age insurance."

Articles 65 and following set out workers' rights in cases of "disability and death." The road toward the good is a long one, and it only grows wider the further the caravan travels.

Tuesday, 7 April: The Issuance of the Unified Labor Law

On this date, in continuation of the law regulating agricultural relations, the President of the Republic issued Decision No. 91, promulgating the Unified Labor Law between the two regions.

Syria led the way on this subject, having already issued a progressive law to protect workers' rights, No. 279 of 1946.

The new law came to place the workers of both regions on equal footing, and to close certain gaps in Syria's 1946 law.

It falls outside the scope of these memoirs to explain in detail all the provisions the new law contains for safeguarding workers' rights without overriding the public interest. I shall content myself, as I have done with other fundamental laws, with giving a clear idea of its substance.

Article 1 defined the employer as "any natural or legal person who employs one or more workers in exchange for a wage of any kind."

Article 2 defined the worker as "any male or female who works in exchange for a wage of any kind, in the service of an employer and under his supervision."

Article 4 excluded government workers, public institutions, and administrative units, except as provided by a decision of the President of the Republic.

The reason for this exclusion was the existence of special legislation defining officials' own rights and duties, and the terms of their treatment and compensation.

For reasons of its own wisdom, the legislator excluded domestic servants from the provisions of this law.

Article 6 rendered void any condition contrary to the provisions of this law, even one predating its entry into force.

One need not recoil from this retroactive feature of the law, since it was necessary to achieve fair equality between workers already employed and those hired after its issuance, and to guarantee the proper functioning of work.

Article 12 provided for the establishment of an employment office under the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, which opened its doors to "anyone out of work, to request that his name be registered with it."

Article 16 required the employer to inform this office of any vacancy arising with him, either in person or by registered letter addressed to it.

The law organized vocational rehabilitation for the disabled, so that they might regain their ability to return to their own work, if possible, or to perform any other suitable work.

It forbade the employment of foreign workers within the Republic unless they obtained prior permission from the Minister of Labor, so as not to compete with the national workforce, while not closing the door either to excellent foreign experts whose skill and expertise the country needed.

To safeguard the rights of both parties to employment, the worker especially, being the weaker party, Article 43 required that a written contract, in the Arabic language, be drawn up between employer and worker, with each party holding a copy of it.

Article 58 provided for granting workers an annual paid leave of 14 days, rising to 21 days after ten years of service.

Article 73 likewise provided that a worker must be granted, at the end of his contract, a severance payment equal to half a month's wage for each of the first five years of work, and a full month's wage for each year thereafter.

Articles 131 and following regulated the employment of women, providing that they may not be employed between the hours of 8 p.m. and 7 a.m. Since the nature of certain work might require their presence during these hours, such as nurses, for instance, the Minister of Labor was authorized to issue a decision exempting certain categories of female workers from this restriction.

Article 124 likewise regulated the employment of minors, forbidding their employment before the completion of their twelfth year, or before the age of fifteen in certain strenuous trades. In all cases, they may not be employed at night, and their daily working hours may not exceed 6 hours.

The law regulated the rules for setting wages, providing for the establishment of a government committee, with one representative for the workers and one for the employers, whose task would be to set a minimum wage (Articles 160 and following).

It also provided for the establishment of a conciliation committee in each province, chaired by the president of the court of first instance or one of its judges, with a union representative for the worker, and the employer attending in person or through a representative.

Article 114 set the worker's working hours at eight hours a day, and forty-eight hours a week, reduced to seven hours in hazardous work, not counting the hour set aside daily for rest.

Importantly, workers in every trade were now granted the right to form their own unions, "to look after their interests and defend their rights" (Article 160).

To safeguard the employer's rights and the national wealth, the worker was required to refrain from any harmful act or negligence.

The law set penalties for every violation of its provisions.

---

Endnotes:

[1] Mahmoud Riad's memoirs, vol. 2, p. 231, Dar al-Mustaqbal, 1986.

[2] Published in the Official Gazette, issue 66, dated 1 April 1959.

[3] Fouad Matar, in his book "Frankly, About Abdel Nasser," p. 159.