The minimum wage in Lebanon was increased three years ago from 500,000 ($330) to 675,000 ($450), yet a lot of people here still think it’s not enough and that it should be drastically increased. There’s no doubt that you can barely live with $450 in Lebanon given how expensive things are now, but that’s not a reason to increase the minimum wage as this could lead to serious economic problems (there are other ways to improve living standards).
I will not dig into this issue as it’s a very complicated one, but I was reading yesterday a chart published by the OECD, Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development, showing the minimum wages in 34 different countries and I thought it would be a nice idea to see where Lebanon stands on that chart. Since the chart is showing the cost per hour after taxes, we need to compute the cost of 1 working hour in Lebanon according to the Labor Law.
As mentioned above, the minimum wage is now 657,000 LL or $450 and most people work 5 days a week and 8 hours a day, which amounts to 168 hours in May for example. If we take Saturdays into consideration the total number of hours would be 188, so the cost of 1 working hour is between $2.4 and $2.7. This means that Lebanon ranks somewhere in the bottom between Hungary and Estonia. Australia and Luxembourg top the list with wages over $9 an hour each, while the US stands in 11th position with $7.25 per hour. As far as Arab countries are concerned, there’s no data available for Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia’s minimum wage is of $720 per month for the public sector while it’s $268 per month in Jordan, $175 in Egypt and between $176–$266 in Syria,
Thank you Elie for the help!
Qatar’s minimum wage is around 3$ / hour for public sector according to the law . You can check out the law over here and scroll to page 55.
http://www.cm.gov.qa/Arabic/hr-goverment-low/Documents/Human%20resources%20Law.pdf
2200 QAR / month for lowest grade (13th) and for 40 working hours / week.
This doesn’t take into consideration the benefits and allowances.
I’m pretty sure you can find the laws for other GCC countries online.
yess,but there are still a lot pple who earn below 450 $ ,so i think 450 is not an official minimum wage
The federally approved minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. I am not sure what that $6.26 is. Also most states have a minimum wage of over $7.25 and some reaching more than $9. Just for clarification.
Thanks !
Small issue : the OECD values are calculated at purshasing power parity.
This means the nominal exchange rate of 1507LPD/1USD can’t be used because it doesn’t take into account PPP (value of a national currency ajusted to the country’s prices, i.e the cost of life.)
Instead you would have to use a PPP exchange rate. I found 1036.11LP/1UDS (IMF).
So this would mean that our 657 000 is worth 634$PPP, = 3.37 to 3.78 per hour. Which would actually put leb between Slovakia and Portugal.
tl;dr