About 650,000 Tunisians joined a nationwide strike on Thursday as pressure mounted on the government over wages, spending and its strained talks with international lenders.
The walkout, organised by the UGTT union, shut schools, universities, municipalities and ministries. Hospitals were left operating with emergency staffing only, making it the biggest strike action in Tunisia in five years.
The dispute comes against the backdrop of Tunisia’s economic turmoil since the 2011 uprising that removed autocrat Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. The revolt was driven by anger over unemployment and poverty, and the country has struggled to stabilise its finances since then.
Earlier in the month, the International Monetary Fund warned Tunisia to keep its public sector wage bill under control to avoid deeper debt trouble. The fund has said the wage bill is among the world’s highest relative to GDP.
UGTT leader Nourredine Taboubi said the situation was becoming dangerous because of rising inflation and a low standard of living. He warned of what he called “a revolution of hungry and empty bellies.”
Taboubi also said the negotiations had failed because “the sovereign decision is not in the hands of the government, but of the IMF.”
Tunisia reached a deal with the IMF in December 2016 for a loan programme worth about $2.8 billion. The package was meant to help overhaul the economy by cutting chronic deficits and trimming bloated public services, but progress has been slow.
The IMF increased pressure after the government agreed last month to raise wages for about 150,000 employees of state companies in a separate deal with the UGTT that ended a threatened strike.
The government wants to reduce the public sector wage bill to 12.5 percent of GDP in 2020 from 15.5 percent. Prime Minister Youssef Chahed is also facing a political crisis over his administration’s failure to fix the economy.
Government spokesman Iyad Dahmani said Chahed would not have approved the wage increase for political gain. He added that the government needed to know who would finance the salary increases, and said international lenders including the IMF had threatened to stop financing Tunisia if reforms did not move forward.
Officials say public sector wages have doubled to about 16 billion dinars ($5.48 billion) in 2018 from 7.6 billion dinars in 2010.
People stand outside a closed court during a nationwide strike in Tunis, Tunisia on November 22, 2018.
