On Sunday, part-time teachers celebrated the launch of the Contractual Teachers’ League in Lebanese Primary Public Schools (CTLP). The event was attended by a number of groups and stakeholders, including founding members of the league, members of parliament, representatives of various political groups and media.
The launch took place in partnership with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) political foundation in Lebanon, which aims at supporting a range of syndicate and rights endeavors in Lebanon and fostering social democracy.
The event included speeches by CTLP president, Nisrine Chahine, FES representative in Lebanon, Merin Abbas, and veteran legal expert Ghassan Slaiby.
The launch is considered a significant milestone as it is the first independent association that represents part-time teachers. While Lebanon does have an Association of Basic Education Teachers, this association only includes full-time teachers and excluded part-time teachers, who comprise 70% of the teaching staff.
The CTLP represents part-time teachers from various backgrounds, and gives them the ability to organize union activities while protected from censorship and repression.
It received the official registration number 1127 after over seven years of organizational and advocacy efforts.
A History of Oppression
The group has been striving to launch the association for over seven years, as the Ministry of Interior unlawfully withheld the registration of the group until the teachers appealed to the State Shura Council, with the support of the Legal Agenda.
Previously, Minister of Education, Abbas al-Halabi, ordered an unlawful decision to strip CTLP president, Nisrine Chahine, of her teaching license. However, Chahine won the case with the State Shura Council, which considered al-Halabi’s decision “arbitrary”, thereby immediately suspending the decision’s implementation in 2022.
“We want to draw our own roadmap,” expressed Chahine in her speech. “We teachers want to obtain our rights. Our right is to have a league that represents us, our right is to have a committee that speaks in our name”.
“We’ve been working seven years to obtain our official registration number for an official league, do you know why? Because unfortunately, the ones who are fighting us, are the ones who have the same cause as us,” added Chahine.
On his part, Ghassan Slaiby emphasized that this committee “independent from the political parties that dominate almost all Lebanese syndicate activity”.
“Almost all [syndicates] are under the complete hegemony of these parties and have no independency”, added Slaiby. “However, this league came forward, [and] showcased its independence despite the fact that is has members of political parties.”
A Step Towards Rights and Civic Action
The active committee that manages the league has so far contributed to the increase of the hourly rate for teachers, equality between academic and vocational degree holders and the approval of the full contract law No. 235 among many other achievements.
The launch of the CTLP represents a significant step towards the establishment of an independent and active union and syndic landscape in Lebanon. Civil society has been repeatedly stifled or hijacked by dominant political actors in the country.
Moreover, the launch of the CTLP also represents a significant step for its members and Lebanese civil society not only legally and organizationally, but morally, as it came after years of oppressive and arbitrary measures, and represents a victory in spite of authorities’ attempts to obstruct its nascence.