Libya’s Teachers Shut Schools in a Nationwide Pay Strike
Libya’s public-school teachers have escalated weeks of protests into an open-ended nationwide strike over low pay, rising living costs and deteriorating school conditions, delaying the start of the academic year across a country still divided between rival authorities.
The movement began with sit-ins on September 13, when schools were due to reopen, and spread from Tripoli to Benghazi before the teachers’ union backed a nationwide walkout. Reuters reported closed schools in both the west and east, while AFP said the strike has affected the start of classes for roughly 1.6 million public-school students.
Teachers say the issue is not only wages. Educators interviewed by Reuters described classrooms without functioning computer or science laboratories, worn-out desks and equipment that staff and parents often have to replace themselves. Many teachers take second jobs because their salaries do not cover basic living costs.
The strike has also exposed sharp inequalities inside Libya’s public-sector pay system. AFP reported that teachers are demanding a unified and fairer salary scale, health insurance and compensation for overtime. Union representatives say public-school teachers can earn roughly 1,000 to 2,500 Libyan dinars a month, while inflation has continued to erode household purchasing power.
The action is unusually broad in a country split between the UN-recognized government in Tripoli and a rival eastern administration. Teachers in Benghazi have joined those in Tripoli, turning a workplace dispute into a rare national labor mobilization across Libya’s political divide.
That breadth matters. Libya’s fragmented institutions have often allowed governments and armed authorities to shift responsibility between competing administrations. The teachers’ movement is instead organizing around material demands that cut across the east-west split: wages, healthcare, school infrastructure and the basic cost of living.
The education ministry in Tripoli has held meetings on teachers’ health-insurance demands and has discussed changing the school calendar to recover lost class time, according to AFP. But the wage dispute remains unresolved, and Reuters reported that the ministry had not provided a substantive response to the teachers’ complaints when contacted.
Parents have expressed concern about a prolonged shutdown, but the strike’s organizers argue that years of promises have failed to improve either teachers’ livelihoods or the condition of public schools. The union’s position is that keeping classrooms open on poverty wages and crumbling infrastructure simply transfers the cost of the system’s failures onto teachers and families.
Libya’s education workers are therefore testing something larger than a salary demand: whether organized labor can force concessions from institutions that have remained politically divided while still controlling the pay and working conditions of hundreds of thousands of public employees.
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