Labor Minister Kamil Abou Sleiman stressed that exempting the Palestinians from work permits requires amending the law and the request to exempt them from abiding by the law cannot be applied.
In a statement to LBCI’s Nharkom Said, Abou Sleiman said that he requested a written letter of the their demands “in order to understand what do they want,” emphasizing that he is convinced that “the situation of the Palestinians is difficult.”
“The Palestinians have been objecting the decision because they consider that there is some sort of privacy for the refugees. A law issued in 2010 exempts them from paying any fee to obtain a work permit and there a special fund at the NSSF they can benefit from at the end of their service if they had a work permit. We are only implementing these privileges and gave them additional facilitations,” the minister explained.
Abou Sleiman considered that “the Palestinian movements are not innocent and the law is not that of the Lebanese Forces but of the Lebanese state,” stressing that if the Palestinians refuse to attend meetings, we will not listen to them.
“I will not back out form implementing the law,” he reiterated, noting that he did not take a new decision to retract it.
In the same context, he declared that they started nightly inspection tours that included 8 institutions in Hazmieh and Dawhat Aramoun, where they issued 19 penalties and 3 warnings.
Commenting on the results of the Labor Ministry’s plan, Abou Sleiman said that the results were encouraging, revealing that 1400 jobs were created in one month for the Lebanese people, where the companies replaced the foreign workers with Lebanese.
Regarding the “Kafala system” of the foreign domestic workers, he noted that it needs to be amended in order to break the link between the workers and the employers.