When Livelihoods Are Displaced:War Crushes Lebanon's Workers

Against the backdrop of Labor Day speeches and the familiar refrain about Lebanese resilience — with its near-folkloric ceremonial trappings — there exists a different reality: an economic, social, and labor reality that is far less suited to celebration and far more unsparing in its accounting.

Now, in a season that should see heightened employment across agriculture, construction, restaurants, hotels, transport, and small businesses, thousands of workers have been pushed out of the labor cycle, or seen their working hours and incomes sharply reduced. The cause is not a natural decline in demand, but the disruption of access to workplaces, the displacement of workers and business owners, road and shop closures, and falling consumption in affected areas.

In this sense, Labor Day in Lebanon is no longer a symbolic social occasion. It has become an indicator of a deeper dysfunction in the labor market. The war that began in 2023, escalated through 2024, and reached its most intense phase in March 2026, struck an economy already hollowed out since 2019 — and it struck hardest at those with the least protection: day laborers, workers in the informal economy, refugees, and migrant workers. These groups depend on irregular income and rarely have access to unemployment benefits, savings, or adequate social protection.

A War on Daily Wages

World Bank figures reveal the scale of the blow. Initial estimates for the 2023-2024 conflict put losses at approximately $8.5 billion: $3.4 billion in physical damage and $5.1 billion in economic losses. Around 166,000 people lost their jobs, wages fell by roughly $168 million, and trade and agriculture were severely disrupted by displacement, crop and livestock damage, and the removal of farmers and workers from the production cycle.

A subsequent assessment covering October 8, 2023 to December 20, 2024 raised the total cost of the conflict to approximately $14 billion — $6.8 billion in physical damage and $7.2 billion in economic losses — with recovery and reconstruction needs estimated at $11 billion. Real GDP contracted by 7.1 percent in 2024, against a projected growth of 0.9 percent had the war not occurred. The conflict did not merely destroy assets; it disrupted production, reduced incomes, and deepened the economic contraction.

In a labor market as fragile as Lebanon's, a worker does not need a formal dismissal notice to lose his income. It is enough for a road to be closed, for a workshop owner to be displaced, for the town where he works to be shelled, for customers to disappear, or for the commute to become too costly and too dangerous. The wage transforms from a fixed income into a daily gamble: if the worker reaches his workplace, he is paid; if he does not, he returns with nothing.

United Nations Development Programme data confirms this. Among workers who retained their jobs following the 2024 war, 35 percent experienced a decline in income, with average monthly earnings falling by 15 percent. Among those whose incomes did fall, the average loss reached 40 percent. Unemployment alone no longer captures the problem: those who remained employed became poorer.

A Portable Loss

Then came the March 2, 2026 escalation. It did not begin from zero — it extended what was already broken. According to Reuters, the latest round of hostilities displaced more than 1.2 million people, roughly one-fifth of the population, while more than 1.24 million people are now at risk of acute food insecurity. These are not merely humanitarian statistics. They are labor market statistics. 1.2 million displaced people means 1.2 million disruptions to employment, housing, transport, education, consumption, and the capacity to earn a living.

Displacement is not the movement of people from one place to another. It is the erasure of their economic place. The farmer cannot carry his land. The mechanic cannot carry his garage. The shopkeeper cannot carry his customers. The construction worker cannot carry his site. The domestic worker loses not only her job but the roof over her head. And the refugee or migrant worker may not even have access to assistance, because papers, nationality, and legal status become additional obstacles when war arrives.

Agriculture: Losing the Land and the Income Together

Agriculture's importance in Lebanon cannot be measured by its GDP share alone, as policymakers have long tried to frame it. In the South, the Bekaa Valley, and Akkar — Lebanon's three main agricultural regions — farming is an income network that encompasses the farmer, the seasonal laborer, the transport driver, the seed seller, the fertilizer shop, the olive press, the vegetable market, and entire families whose livelihoods depend on tobacco, olive, citrus, and potato harvest cycles. Losing a season is not losing a crop; it is losing the cash income that sustains a household for months.

The war struck this network directly. In the most recent escalation, more than 76 percent of southern farmers were displaced and 22 percent of agricultural land was damaged, according to figures cited by Reuters. Before that, the 2024 war had already inflicted heavy losses on the sector's infrastructure, assets, and output, estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Agriculture does not recover quickly. A tree needs time to return to production. Damaged land requires rehabilitation. The seasonal laborer who was displaced may not return. Losing farmland therefore means not only reduced output, but the disappearance of thousands of daily wages, the loss of entire villages' cash seasons, and rising food prices for families whose incomes have already fallen. Where the loss of farmland intersects with food security, the equation is stark: more expensive food, less income, and deeper indebtedness. The threat of acute food insecurity facing 1.24 million people in Lebanon means, in economic terms, that work no longer suffices to feed the worker.

The Economy That Does Not Appear in War Bulletins

What applies to agriculture applies, in different forms, to construction and services. For decades, much of Lebanon's hard physical labor has been performed by poor Lebanese workers alongside Syrian, Palestinian, and migrant laborers — in construction sites, cleaning services, restaurants, warehouses, transport, and agriculture. These workers have no access to remote work. A concrete worker cannot pour foundations from a shelter. A cleaner cannot collect wages from a shuttered hotel. A driver cannot survive in a city emptied of passengers.

The International Labour Organization, in a rapid assessment of the 2024 war's impact on private-sector workers and enterprises — covering approximately 2,300 workers and more than 700 businesses — found that the conflict had severely damaged employment levels, incomes, business operations, and recovery prospects. In a country where the small enterprise is the rule, not the exception, the disruption of a business means the disruption of a family, not merely the setback of a corporation.

The paradox is that these are precisely the sectors whose workers are called upon during reconstruction: construction, transport, metalwork, carpentry, agriculture, services. Yet they are also the first to be crushed during war. The worker who will be asked to rebuild what was destroyed is the same worker who has already lost his home, his tools, his income, and perhaps his health.

Refugees and Migrant Workers: The War's Most Exposed

It is easy, in Lebanon, for catastrophe to be redirected into hostility toward the most vulnerable: refugees compete with Lebanese workers, foreign laborers take jobs, the market cannot accommodate them. But war reveals that these groups are not outside the economy — they are in its most precarious layers, where wages are lowest, protections are weakest, and exploitation is easiest.

The Syrian worker in agriculture or construction, the Palestinian worker in services and trades, the migrant domestic worker — all of them lose employment in wartime, and sometimes housing too. They may be unable to access aid or official registration centers. Domestic workers in Lebanon are further exposed by the kafala sponsorship system, which ties their legal residency to their employer and denies them the labor protections that apply to other workers, leaving them without recourse when employment ends.

Rather than protecting these groups — alongside poor Lebanese workers — through clear labor standards, fair wages, and genuine social guarantees, the state leaves them in a single market where everyone competes for less income and fewer opportunities.

The problem is not the presence of the more vulnerable worker. The problem is an economy that profits from their vulnerability and disavows them in crisis. This is one of Lebanon's harshest contradictions: it summons cheap labor to build, farm, and serve, then leaves those workers unprotected when the shells fall, the roads close, and the wages stop.

No Labor Policy Without an Income Policy

On Labor Day, it is not enough for the state to catalogue the destruction. It must catalogue the losses of income and employment: Who lost their wages? Whose working hours were cut? Whose earnings no longer cover basic needs? Who has left the labor market altogether? And who was displaced not only from their home, but from their source of livelihood?

Plans that begin with bricks alone remain incomplete. Rebuilding a home without rebuilding its owner's income is meaningless. An agricultural compensation package that does not finance the next season accomplishes little. Short-term food aid solves nothing if the worker remains without wages when it runs out.

This is not only a crisis of employment. It is a crisis of income and dignity. The work that is supposed to protect the worker from poverty has itself come under threat in Lebanon — from the field to the tent, from the workshop to the aid queue, from the wage to the debt.