On semigroups in which every Rees one-sided congruence is a congruence

The purpose of this paper is to examine the structure of those semigroups which satisfy one or both of the following conditions: A_r(A_ℓ): The Rees right (left) congruence associated with any right (left) ideal is a congruence. The conditions A_r and A_ℓ are generalizations of commutativity for semigroups. This paper is a continuation of the work of Oehmke 5] and Jordan 4] on H-semigroups (H for hamiltonian, a semigroup is called an H-semigroup if every one-sided congruence is a two-sided congruence). In fact the results of section 2 of Oehmke 5] are proved here under the condition A_r and/or A_ℓ and not the stronger hamiltonian condition. Section 1 of this paper is essentially a summary of the known results of Oehmke. In section 2 we examine the structure of irreducible semigroups satisfying the condition A_r and/or A_ℓ. In particular we determine all regular (torsion) irreducible semigroups satisfying both the conditions A_r and A_ℓ. This research has been supported by Grant A7877 of the National Research Council of Canada.