Electricite du Liban’s hourly-wage employees stormed the company’s headquarters in Beirut Wednesday by breaking the building’s main gate after the Internal Security Forces prevented them from entering the premises.

Electricite du Liban's hourly-wage employees stormed the company’s headquarters in Beirut Wednesday by breaking the building’s main gate after the Internal Security Forces prevented them from entering the premises.

The angry protesters escalated their strike demanding the cabinet to approve their full-time employment.

Earlier, they engaged in a dispute with the ISF for allowing only full-time employees to enter the company’s premises.

The protesters blocked the roads with burning tires, causing bumper-to-bumper traffic, but the roads were later reopened.

Meanwhile, other hourly-wage employees blocked with burning tires several roads in the southern city of Tyre, the town of Riyaq in the eastern Bekaa valley, Bint Jbeil and the main road in Baakline near the company’s building.

The employees also held a sit-in near the company’s building in the southern city of Sidon.

Others closed the electricity offices in Bikfaya, Baabdat and Nabatiyeh and ordered employees out of the buildings.

The hourly-wage workers also closed the EDL building in Mashghara and blocked the Mashghara-Jezzine road with burning tires.

The employees, who have been protesting for the past four weeks, are demanding their full-time employment.

However, Energy Minister Jebran Bassil had proposed to hire several employees permanently at EDL, but they are refusing his suggestion arguing that some of them have been hourly-wage workers for over 20 years.

In remarks published Wednesday, Bassil said that those workers will not get their monthly salaries if they continued refusing to do their job and collect bills.

“The collection of bills is stopped, and if the situation continues, there will be no salaries,” he told Al-Jumhuriya local newspaper.

Bassil also said that the solution to the crisis of the EDL hourly-wage workers was to conduct an assessment of the employees in order to choose the competent among them that would become part of the permanent staff.

“Some of the workers that have been protesting in recent weeks are intentionally rioting because they do not want the crisis to be resolved, they are benefitting from the odd situation and want to keep it as it is,” Bassil told the newspaper.

In the meantime, Head of the Public Works, Transportation, Energy and Water Parliamentary Commission Mohammad Qabbani on Wednesday said that the hourly-wage workers at the Electricite Du Liban company had the right to be hired as full-time employees.

“A month ago, [our] parliamentary committee approved a draft law to assign all the hourly-wage workers as permanent employees because it was their right,” Qabbani told local Al-Jadeed network.

He also said: “These workers have been working for the electricity company for years, and they have the right to be permanent workers.”