Oct 16, 2019

A month-long teachers strike in Jordan ended on Oct. 6. It's seen as a triumph for public sector employees and a defeat for a government that has failed to deliver on its promises of improving the lives of Jordanians. The strike, the longest in Jordan’s history, ended after Prime Minister Omar Razzaz made a public apology for the use of force against protesting teachers on Sept. 5 and later reached a deal with the Jordan Teachers Syndicate that offered a 35% to 70% pay raise for more than 140,000 public school teachers.

A majority of Jordanians stood by the striking teachers even as more than 1.5 million students in the public school system were out of class for almost a month. The crisis underlined the growing discontent with the failure by successive governments to improve the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of public sector employees against a backdrop of rising cost of living, high unemployment and poverty.

It also highlighted the failure by the government, which initially rejected demands to embrace a 50% salary raise, to justify its policy to the public. The syndicate had reached an agreement in 2014 over a raise, but the deal was never executed. The latest agreement will go into effect in January next year.

After finally succumbing to the syndicate’s demands, the government now fears that other public sector employees may soon make similar ones. The government had claimed that the raise teachers were demanding would cost the state budget about 150 million Jordanian dinars annually ($211 million) and that it had no means to fund the raise. It later asked the Finance Ministry to seek additional loans to cover the deficit. As the government made these claims, it also announced that it was adhering to a royal directive to increase the salaries of retired army personnel by 25 million Jordanian dinars ($35 million) with immediate effect.

When thousands of teachers tried to stage a protest in front of the Prime Ministry on Sept. 5, police used force to disperse them and made a number of arrests. The syndicate complained that a number of those arrested were strip-searched and humiliated. When the syndicate responded with an open-ended strike, the government’s initial reaction was to reject the teachers’ demands, which included a public apology, outright. Then as the strike entered its second week, the government attempted to negotiate a deal that the teachers deemed insulting.