Long post incoming.
On the subject of the military, I find that there are two ironies worth mentioning that people are just generally unaware of:
Before that though, let's acknowledge that military officers (army or otherwise) are among the highest paid and most privileged people in the country. That 1,500,000 LBP that Tech Guru mentioned is only the new
base salary for a just-graduated lieutenant (equivalent of 3 years at university) not including fuel money (which is around 200,000 LBP/month), fuel coupons, and various other financial aids, commendations, and benefits (which only increase in value over their years of service) that can easily net them an extra 500,000 LBP combined monthly total for the lowest officer rank, which is already leagues better than any fresh university graduate can ever dream of making in this country.
#1. Those many university graduates who are unable to find safe and decent jobs because of the precarious local job market will (and do) eventually consider enrolling in the military. Not as officers though, because they'll be past the maximum age for officer enrollment in the military academy, so they'll be enrolled as either sergeants (if they're lucky), or worse, and they'll do it not for the low salary, but for the stability and the guaranteed lifelong medical insurance to support their family, especially their aging parents. They'll be more qualified than the officers themselves (higher degrees), but they'll serve under them like dogs regardless, and earn slightly more than half of what the lowest lieutenant makes. In 25 years that lieutenant will have been promoted to general and earning no less than 8,000,000 LBP per month if we include aids, special benefits and paid-for training trips. And the sergeants/university graduates? They'll be chief warrant officers مؤهل أول (not real officers) and earning something around 2,500,000 LBP max all things included,
after 25 years. Or if they're really lucky, they can compete for officer positions after a minimum of five years and hope that they get accepted. I know people who have passed their tests a decade ago and still haven't been promoted officers, and others who have failed their tests and became officers regardless.
#2.
Take a look at these two graphs.*
For a law that was primarily designed from the start to help out the military of all ranks, it did nothing for the lower ranks if not buried them in deeper financial problems in this new economy. You'll quickly notice that all the civil servants, with the exception of Category 5 (the lowest and least qualified), all received raises worth 70-80% of their previous base salaries at the most basic level, whereas the military only received 30-40%
at best. Now, 35% for a high-ranking officer is actually not a bad deal at all, because their
base salary is decent (did we forget that they get a
ton of additional benefits?). However, for the low-earning non-officers, a 300,000 LBP raise is barely enough to pay for the increasing school transportation costs, which they may have to subscribe their children to now because of the new, longer working hours. Pretty much what this law did was treat them like garbage and equate them with Category 5. This is an absolutely crushing double blow for those university graduates I talked about. And keep in mind that civilians can have tests for promotions (and huge jumps) across categories, so a C5 can become a C3 if they wanted to. There's no equivalent option in the military.
It's a tricky situation. The civilian sector constitutes probably around 10% of all government employees, while the rest is all military, mostly army. The numbers are disproportionate, and as a result we can't expect the government to give equal raises to both. At the same time, not enough money has been made available to bounce the non-officers to at least half-way between C4 and C5. All in all, and for the time being, they're the biggest losers.
* A few extra notes: the graphs don't show all the civilian categories فئات. Category 1 is basically god-tier and not comparable to anything else. Category 2 is split into two categories like Category 3 (specialists and administrative) and is slightly below god-tier and still wouldn't fit in the second graph. Category 4 is actually made of several more sub-classes, but I picked the first class for a quick reference, as the salary raise is proportionally the same across all the others.
NuclearVision wrotedsoftware.king wroteNow am not saying that the public sector employees dont deserve a raise but...come one, we all know how things go around. The majority of the public sector employees are corrupt and they make 20X their salary.
Could you tell this to a soldier generously sacrificing his life fighting against terrorists?
Do you know that the an important fraction of "public sector employees" are military personnel, I can't see how these could make x20 their salaries.
The point is, there is corruption But i believe it's known exactly where, and the solution would be to clean these posts, and not ignoring salary law because of this " minority".
Corruption isn't as simple as someone exploitatively making 20x their salary, or someone in an undeserved high-ranking position. In Lebanon it's usually a network of people: families, relatives, and friends, with influencing power and/or in positions of authority, who work together to put more of their own people in more positions of power or to allow them special privileges, which is not only unethical, but also illegal in most cases. Cleaning out these positions is pretty much going to involve removing and replacing
a lot of government employees in the civilian sector, and a whole bunch of officers in the military. You'll be turning the country upside down, and not one political party is going to let you do that, because they all have stakes and assets in the government in the form of families, loyalists and allies, and furthermore, they've all more or less agreed on the positions each party should have. Changing the status quo would involve disputing these powerful networks, which means the eventual intervention of high-ranked people. A million things could happen then, but let's just say that Lebanon has found its own ways to abate its internal conflicts and maintain its social and political stability.
I will say though, not all public sector employees are necessarily corrupt or earn extraordinary salaries like dsoftware.king said, even if they got in through nepotism. Most are content with what they got, making average or below average money and just doing their routine jobs, civilians and military alike. However, there are many ways to game the current system, and of course there are people who don't hesitate to grab themselves some advantages. The latest one that I learned about is called "exceptional grades" درجات استثنائية which I already briefly discussed in the graphs above. When civilians make yearly renewable contracts with the government, the latter (typically the ministry involved) may or may not choose to give them extra grades that are not part of their years of service, based on their work experience and/or education. It's not currently known what dictates the exact number of grades that can be granted, and from what I've seen, it might as well be completely arbitrary, and as a result, prone to manipulation. If a person is not happy with the offered salary, they can make some phone calls to have the contract modified to include more grades for them. They can have a huge number of grades that equal 40 years of service and be placed with people who have more work experience and more qualifications than them, but who earn normal salaries that don't even reach 50% of what that person with near-zero experience gets. AND it's a done deal that's perfectly safe and legitimate, because the ministry agreed to the modified contract and signed it. This is only one of the ways to game the system, and there are so many others that are even more ridiculous, both in the civilian sector and the military.
Do remember though, that not every civilian employee that you come across is an exploiting cheater. If they're not directors or anything like that, chances are they make less than you do.