Thousands of teachers march in Lisbon over pay and stalled careers

Thousands of teachers filled central Lisbon on Saturday, marching from Cais do Sodré to Restauradores in a show of force that FENPROF said drew about 25,000 teachers, educators and researchers. The union said the protest was about the valuation of the teaching profession and the defense of public education, but the scale of the turnout also made it a broader warning: after inflation and years of wage restraint, governments across Europe are being pressed to keep essential public workers on the job without blowing up budgets.

FENPROF announced the demonstration on March 21 and said strike action remained possible if the government refused to negotiate a revision of the Teaching Career Statute. Secretary-general José Feliciano Costa said weekly protest actions could continue through the end of the school year, leaving open a longer confrontation with the centre-right government of Luís Montenegro. The Lisbon march was not a single-day outburst so much as the latest stage in a dispute that has been building around Portugal’s public education system for years.

At the center of that fight is the so-called frozen service time from the bailout era. In 2024, the government reached an agreement with unions to restore, in stages between 2024 and 2027, more than six years and six months of career time that had been frozen after the 2011 bailout. One account described the lost period as 6 years, 6 months and 23 days. The deal was meant to move more than 100,000 public school teachers up the pay scale, but it did not include back pay, and many teachers say the restoration still leaves them short of full compensation.

The wage structure explains why the anger has endured. Teachers on the lowest pay scale earn about 1,714 euros a month before tax, while top pay is roughly 3,700 euros and can take nearly 40 years to reach. Over a full career, teachers’ salaries can run 15% to 25% below the OECD average, while statutory salaries for upper secondary teachers changed little from 2015 to 2022 even as the OECD average rose. For a system already struggling to retain younger staff, that gap is more than an accounting issue.

Catarina Pinheiro, a 47-year-old geology teacher, said she had lost 60,000 euros she will never recover and described the government’s offer as crumbs. Her grievance echoed a wider concern that low pay and slow progression are driving away talent just as Portugal needs stable staffing in schools. OECD data show Portugal spent 5.1% of GDP on primary-to-tertiary education in 2020, but spending per student was about 14% below the OECD average. With an ageing teaching workforce and one of the OECD’s largest shares of adults without upper secondary education, the pressure on classrooms is becoming a test of whether public systems can still promise careers worth staying in.