The First Strike

In the wake of such other manifestations of civilization as oil rigs, Cadillacs, air-conditioning units and Coca-Cola, labor strife came last week to Saudi Arabia. The country's first real labor disturbance caught the government completely unprepared, for 73-year-old King Ibn Saud had never got around to making any law for or against strikes, while the devisers of the Moslem Sharia (sacred law) had never anticipated a Taft-Hartley world.

Saudi Arabia's delayed awakening began in August when nine employees marched into Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Co., biggest enterprise in the land) demanding "justice" for all the company's 15,000 native workers. After its first surprise, the U.S.-owned oil company agreed to hear the spokesmen (all of them, it turned out, educated at Aramco expense, two in the U.S.). Their demands: a living allowance of $240 monthly added on to their $42 minimum wage, "living conditions just like American employees," air conditioning for all Saudi workers' homes, substantial reductions in foreign personnel.

As quickly as Aramco tried to settle one disputed issue, the leaders raised another. They seemed less interested in winning gains than fomenting trouble. There was good reason to believe they were influenced by Communists, some of whose literature had recently been seized by Saudi police. Then to Aramco's relief, the government stepped in, took over the negotiations. At first, the Arabian negotiators listened openmouthed as the labor leaders attacked the "backward" government, then, recovering, they clapped the agitators in jail.

That did it. Last week, defiantly demanding that the government release their leaders, 13,000 of Aramco's 15,000 native workers walked out in a surprisingly well-organized general strike. Nothing like this had ever happened before in autocratic Saudi Arabia: strikers rioted in front of a police station, slugged foreign workers and stoned vehicles.

Enraged, Crown Prince Saud (who is trying to run the country while his father lies critically ill) ordered the men to return to work. If they did not, he said, he would ship them back to their villages, where they used to enjoy the benefits of a 7 1/2-c--a-day wage. Whatever happened, Saudi Arabia would never be the same again. The astonished government muttered that it was looking into labor laws in other countries to see what they did about this sort of thing.

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