Zachary Cuyler
February 10, 2026
Arabic version
In the early 1970s, two labor experts—‘Afif Zaynati and Lucien Berouti—made a series of proposals that might seem radical now but were thinkable across most of Lebanon’s political spectrum at the time. These authors and other labor leaders articulated a vision for Lebanon that looked something like the “Nordic model,” under which economic and social policy is formulated through state-mediated negotiation between representatives of collectively organized labor and capital. By the mid-1970s, this vision for Lebanon’s political economy was backed by an increasingly powerful labor movement and shared across a wide swathe of the political spectrum, including Arab nationalists, communists, and liberal and illiberal reformists.
Lebanon was undergoing major economic and social shifts in the early 1970s. First, and often forgotten, was rapid industrialization. Between 1970 and 1974, the industrial workforce grew from an estimated 70,000 workers to an estimated 120,000. Simultaneously, Lebanon was subject to rapid inflation, intensified by the rise of oil prices across the early 1970s.
But the country was also experiencing a moment of labor strength. In 1964, the Collective Contracts law had been passed as one of Fouad Chehab’s last acts in office during the course of a potentially disruptive national oil workers’ strike. This law legalized bargaining for collective contracts at the level of the firm or the sector, and gave these contracts the force of law via collective contracts by publishing them in the Official Gazette. In response to inflation and with this new legal armature, labor strikes for raises and popular protests against inflation became widespread across late 1960s and early 1970s. Lebanon’s unions won national salary increases for all formally employed commercial and industrial workers in 1965, 1971, 1973, and 1974. Labor unions were also increasingly involved in tripartite negotiations with capital and the state, and held official positions in national policymaking bodies (including the National Labor Council, the Social and Economic Council, and the Social Security Board).
But this moment of labor strength had its limits. Regular strikes were failing to resolve the inflation issue, especially for the large portion of the population who did not enjoy union membership or formal employment in commerce or industry. Indeed, major segments of the workforce were left out of Lebanon’s labor law, unions, and limited state welfare provisions, and were also excluded from the nation-wide raises that unions had won across the late 1960s and early 1970s. These included agricultural,domestic, and informal workers, Syrian migrant workers, and Palestinian refugees, who were left behind and exposed to deepening economic turbulence as unionized workers scored repeated victories.
In this context, Lebanese union leaders and members of a new class of university-trained, international organization-linked labor experts began developing proposals for rational, scientific, and apolitical methods to transcend these constant labor disputes in order to avoid what they saw as the possibility of open class warfare.
One such labor leader and expert, ‘Afif Zaynati, was an oil worker who had been active in the Lebanese labor movement since the 1950s, as president of the Esso Employees’ Syndicate. He represented Lebanese organized labor at the International Labor Organization (ILO) from the 1960s until 1973, and by the 1970s worked as an ILO labor expert. Zaynati held a doctorate in economics from Université Saint-Joseph, where he taught economics and industrial relations.
In the early 1970s Zaynati published a two-volume book titled Labor Syndicates through the West German social democratic Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. This book was a diagnosis of the shortcomings of the labor movement in Lebanon, and a vision for what it might be. In it, Zaynati argued that the movement did not incorporate enough of the labor force, and was not organized to constitute a “pressure force in the contemporary sense” or to hold “deterrent force” (“quwa dariba”). He criticized the movement as being excessively individualistic, in that it was organized around self-serving labor leaders, shared the same “anarchic spirit” (“ruh al-fawda”) as Lebanese society as a whole, and like Lebanese society lacked a proper “national” or “public spirit” (“al-ruh al-wataniyya” and “ruh al-maslaha al-’ama”). He also argued that clientelism within the labor movement remained an important obstacle to a genuinely democratic trade unionism that would help build a more democratic polity.
Zaynati developed a multi-point reform program to overcome these shortcomings. He sought to reorganize the labor movement along sectoral, rational, functional and meritocratic lines to overcome the excessively personalized nature of trade union leadership. He also emphasized institutionalized negotiation between organized classes on the basis of Lebanon’s Collective Contracts law as a means of achieving national unity and rational economic policy.
These new arrangements would allow unions to play their proper role in a liberal democracy: participation in formulating and implementing economic and social policy, contributing to economic and social development, and expanding political power to the middle and lower classes while preparing workers to engage in national democratic life. Under this model, the state had the obligation to “ensure the political, legal, economic, and social framework in which the worker and employer interact on the basis of equity, balance, and cooperation.” This formalized relationship between labor, capital, and the state would allow the labor movement to avoid the “route of class struggle” (“ṭariqat al-sira’ al-ṭabaqi”), with its undesirable consequences: “long and costly strikes… competing with the authority of the state and employers for its own sake, revolutionary and anarchistic (fawdawiyya) strikes against syndical leadership, [and] the lowering of productivity,” among other ills. Taking these steps and avoiding class struggle would thus contribute to “building our nation” and “developing [a] modern society” (“tatwir al-mujtama’ al-hadith”) along rational and cooperative lines.
Lucien Berouti articulated a similar but pointedly illiberal program of reform. Berouti was a lawyer with a doctorate in economics who was employed as an ILO Manpower Specialist as of the mid-1970s. He published several studies on labor and economic development with the ILO, Lebanese University’s Institute of Social Sciences Research Center, and the United Nations Economic and Social Office.
In The Employment Crisis in Lebanon, Berouti indicated that he believed that class war was on the horizon, and that Lebanon’s liberal labor movement and political regime were not equipped to prevent it. He therefore laid out a plan for realizing several goals simultaneously: full employment of the “national workforce,” prevent the erosion of workers’ purchasing power, and “[reduce] the intensity of [labor] conflicts and [democratize] the structures of production,” all in the service of “creating in Lebanon a climate of social peace favorable to the improvement of productivity of the workforce and thus the economic development of the country.”
Berouti was centrally concerned with the well-being and productivity of the “national workforce.” He argued that the state was obligated to protect it against “the risks of unemployment and underemployment,” “to ensure each Lebanese a fitting job,” and guard against “the continual depreciation of purchasing power.” But the threats that he identified to the “national workforce” help us understand what he meant by that term: formally employed male citizen workers who already made up the core of the labor movement. Berouti saw the employment of women and children as problems because of their impact on adult male employment and wage levels, and argued that noncitizen workers—especially Palestinian refugees and Syrian migrant laborers—exposed citizen workers to greater risk of unemployment.
Berouti believed that disruptive labor mobilization would continue, and genuine class conflict might emerge, if the state failed to channel workers’ frustrations into an effective, united, and—crucially—depoliticized labor movement. He contended that the labor movement was incapable of avoiding real class conflict given its organizational and political fragmentation, its “vassalage to political parties and personalities,” its failure to respond to the needs of the rank-and-file, and the preeminence of a liberal-minded and employer-aligned labor aristocracy. At the same time, he also criticized the labor movement’s failure to incorporate the entire citizen workforce, especially agricultural and public-sector workers.
This pointed to the ambitious goal of extending organized labor to encompass all of the relatively expansively conceived Lebanese working class (which nonetheless excluded women and noncitizens). This was to be paired with a much more restrictive immigration policy to limit the number of noncitizen workers in the country. For Berouti, the expansion of union membership to the whole formally employed citizen workforce, the reorganization of organized labor along sectoral lines, and the representation of labor on government planning and policymaking bodies were critical to harmonizing and rationalizing relations between labor, capital, and the state. This would ensure what the French corporatist thinker François Perroux called “the costs of man… food, housing, education, and health,” and protect the national labor force against unemployment, underemployment, and inflation.
Berouti proposed a similar program to Zaynati’s: to reorganize and expand the labor movement to achieve harmonious relations by establishing a “balance of [the] existing forces.” He argued that unions should be able to form without government approval, and that workers in agriculture and the public sector be allowed to organize themselves. Collective contracts negotiated sector by sector would then standardize labor conditions, prevent segmentation, and allow workers in each sector to rationally represent their particular interests. Berouti moreover suggested that the Collective Contracts Law be amended to loosen limits on strikes so that workers would be more willing to raise grievances that could be formally mediated and arbitrated.
The entire national workforce, thus organized and empowered, should then be incorporated into an apolitical national labor confederation organized by sector to rationally represent workers’ collective interests. In turn, employers’ associations ought to be reorganized into a National Confederation of Employers in order to engage in state-mediated dialogue with organized labor. The resulting equilibrium of power between labor, capital, and the state would allow labor relations to transcend disruptive conflict and move toward productive communication through “the institutionalization of collective dialogue.” This would protect workers against economic uncertainty and redistribute a fairer share of Lebanon’s wealth to labor through an array of rational and scientific systems. For Berouti, such arrangements better approximated democracy than did Lebanon’s chaotic liberal regime.
Zaynati and Berouti also converged on a mechanism that seemingly promised to automatically resolve distributional conflicts. In both books, Zaynati and Berouti each proposed the use of a “wage escalator” that would automatically adjust wages across the entire labor force in response to inflation. This radical proposal would have insulated those covered by Lebanon’s labor law against the effects of inflation, and constituted a state-backed guarantee of workers’ real incomes.
Lebanon’s national labor confederation adopted this proposal and began to demand that the government implement such a mechanism, and on the eve of civil war, the government began formulating a “wage escalator” bill with input from organized labor. Such ideas were attractive across the political spectrum. Reformists like Zaynati and Berouti supported it, as did the U.S. embassy in Beirut, which hoped it would calm labor unrest. But the proposal also became part of the 1975 program of Lebanon’s communist labor federation, which saw it as a win for the working class.
This rational and technical approach had limitations. Because it only would have applied to those workers covered by Lebanese labor law, it likely would have excluded large portions of the working classes, especially informal and agricultural workers, Syrian migrant workers, and Palestinian refugees. This would have exacerbated the growing distinction between those workers who belonged to unions and enjoyed mandated wage increases and other social protections, and those who did not. But Arab nationalist and communist mobilized to extend union membership and legal protections to these workers, eventually winning over reformists like Zaynati to the idea of dramatically expanding union eligibility. If this effort had been successful, inflation may well have ceased to erode real wages across the entire labor force.
The “wage escalator” mechanism had several limitations. Automatic wage adjustments may have deprived the labor movement of a key mobilizing issue for rank-and-file workers that extended across sectors, possibly reducing labor unions’ unity and strength. And it is unclear that price and wage controls could ever stabilize economic life at the level of a single small nation-state like Lebanon.
But more centrally, this approach was limited because it represented a fantasy that class conflict could be resolved seamlessly by technical and apolitical means. This horizon was only open because political movements, including especially - but not only - the labor movement, were powerful and militant. Despite their allergy to politics, labor experts like Zaynati and Berouti could only credibly imagine rationalizing and resolving class conflict because they were sitting on top of a movement.
Zakaria Cuyler is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. His scholarship focuses on the historical and contemporary politics of infrastructure, energy, and the environment in the mashriq. His academic work has been published in International Labor and Working-Class History, Historical Materialism, Labor History, and the Arab Studies Journal, and he has written on the contemporary politics of the mashriq for Middle East Report, Synaps, and L’Orient-Le Jour. Zachary’s book project, “Fossil Lebanon,” examines how Lebanon’s relationship to the oil industry shaped the country’s politics, economy, and built environment across the mid-20th century.