Teachers’ pay and working conditions have once again become the subject of intense political bargaining in Latvia. In recent months, the Latvian Trade Union of Education and Science Employees, LIZDA, has returned to negotiations with the government, this time over both pay and a new method of calculating workloads. Ahead of the parliamentary elections on 3 October, politicians suddenly began listening particularly closely to teachers, too.

This was no coincidence. Since the spring 2023 strike, the country’s largest teachers’ strike, LIZDA has become an organisation the government has to negotiate with over almost every new decision on pay, school funding or teachers’ working hours.

I witnessed that strike and followed how its gains gradually took effect. It could have been a case study in a union activist’s handbook: how public sector workers in one of Europe’s less affluent countries fight for higher pay and then try to hold on to what they have won.

Latvia is indeed among the EU countries with relatively low average wages. But household incomes are gradually rising, and the union closely monitors how much of the budget goes towards education workers’ pay, regularly intervening in budget negotiations.

Three days on strike

By late 2022, both Russian- and Latvian-language media were regularly reporting that teachers and preschool educators in Latvia were paid shamefully little. The average figure cited was around €1,000.

There had been parliamentary elections then, too, accompanied by a flood of promises. As so often happens, many had been forgotten by early 2023, and the union began threatening to bring school lessons to a halt. The threat was discussed, but few seemed to take it seriously.

There was another complication. Latvia’s formerly Russian-language schools were transitioning to teaching in Latvian. Some might have counted on teachers from different language communities being unable to agree on joint action. But they did agree.

During the strike, on 24–26 April 2023, I was in Kauguri, on the western edge of Jūrmala. It is a former workers’ settlement built up in the 1970s and 1980s with standard five- and nine-storey apartment blocks.

As I drove past schools, I saw small groups of teachers outside almost every main entrance, sometimes with placards and national flags. Everything looked peaceful, but there was tension: strikers at one school were not always sure their colleagues at neighbouring schools had joined them. By noon, though, it was clear that the strike was under way.

I later asked Nelda Ose, who teaches visual arts and design at a school in Jūrmala and had taken part in the protests, about some of the details. I particularly wanted to know how school heads had responded. “They let everyone go to the rally,” Nelda told me. “They probably wanted us to get a pay rise, too. They themselves are well paid.”

Were Latvian- and Russian-speaking teachers united? “We shared the same position,” Nelda explained. “As for language, we could all speak both languages anyway. But I don’t know how readily other school heads let their staff go. It wasn’t like my school everywhere. To be honest, I didn’t hear Russian spoken in the square during the rally, only Latvian.” Linguistic differences did not prevent joint mobilisation. Pay and workload mattered more.

In Riga alone, around 160 schools suspended lessons, and preschools joined them. The organisational and mobilisation work of union activists was impressive. In Latgale, where a particularly high proportion of the population speaks Russian, lessons stopped at almost every school. More than 19,000 teachers took part in the three-day strike. Over 8,000 people joined the large march in Riga, with healthcare workers marching alongside teachers and preschool educators.

On 24 April, even the then prime minister, Krišjānis Kariņš, came out of the government building to meet the protesters. He came out, and ministry representatives spoke at the rally, but the negotiations that followed lasted another month or so and proved extremely difficult. Their main outcome was an agreement to raise teachers’ pay in stages.

Successive pay rises

The minimum hourly rate rose to €8.50 on 1 September 2023, then to €9.54 on 1 January 2024. On 1 January 2025, it increased to €9.79 an hour, or €1,566 a month for a full 40-hour working week. There was no increase in 2026, as the government froze public sector pay. A new schedule has, however, been approved: the minimum rate is due to reach €10.35 an hour in January 2027, then rise by 5.75% annually to €12.24 in 2030.

The minimum rate and an individual teacher’s actual salary are very different things. The education ministry puts average teachers’ pay in the 2025/26 school year at €1,841 a month on a full-time-equivalent basis. About a quarter of teachers receive the minimum rate. But “on a full-time-equivalent basis” is crucial: many teachers do not have a full-time workload, and their hours depend heavily on their subject and school.

The debate therefore gradually shifted from the hourly rate to another question: what should count as a full teaching workload? Teachers do more than give lessons. They mark assignments, prepare classes, develop teaching programmes and communicate with parents. That is working time, too, but there are very different ways to account for it.

The debate over forty hours

In 2026, the education ministry proposed a single standard: a full-time post would mean a 40-hour working week for every category of teacher.

On paper, that seems logical. Until now, a full-time workload could mean 30, 36 or 40 hours, depending on the group of teachers concerned. The ministry says the new system would not require teachers to work more; only the way working time is counted would change. It is due to take effect on 1 September 2027.

The union saw a risk. LIZDA chair Inga Vanaga warned that simply recalculating workloads against a 40-hour standard could slightly reduce the incomes of around 40,000 teachers. A teacher whose programme provides 36 hours, currently counted as full-time, could find those same hours reclassified as 0.9 of a full-time post.

The government describes this as a technical change to the accounting system. The union looks at the same formula from another angle: how much money will an individual actually receive? Following the union’s objections, the system was not introduced immediately. Its details remain under discussion, and the transition has been pushed back to September 2027.

€680 million for school funding

The struggle has produced another result. On 1 September 2026, a new school funding system, “Programma skolā” (“School Programme”), came into use. State funding for teachers’ salaries is now calculated using a method intended to account for the educational programme, schools’ needs and support staff costs, rather than just pupil numbers under the previous “money follows the pupil” model.

An additional €45 million has been earmarked for introducing the model in 2026 alone. At the end of September, the government allocated almost €680 million in targeted education grants to municipalities, taking the new system into account.

Disputes over the model are not over. Questions remain about the criteria for small schools, particularly in rural and border areas. But the shift itself matters: a debate that began with an individual teacher’s pay has expanded to encompass the entire school funding system.

An agreement with a political alliance

Events immediately before this year’s parliamentary elections were particularly revealing. On 30 September, just three days before the vote, LIZDA signed a written agreement with the political alliance Jaunā Vienotība (“New Unity”).

This is no small fringe party. Jaunā Vienotība is a consistently pro-European, centre-right alliance built around the Vienotība party. Its representatives have been at the heart of Latvian politics for years. Krišjānis Kariņš, who headed governments from 2019, and Evika Siliņa, prime minister from 2023 to May 2026, both came from this political force. After Siliņa resigned, the alliance stayed in government, joining Andris Kulbergs’s new cabinet alongside the United List, the National Alliance and the Union of Greens and Farmers. In the outgoing Saeima, Latvia’s parliament, Jaunā Vienotība still had the largest parliamentary group of these four partners, with 25 members.

In other words, the organisation signing an agreement with the union three days before the election was a political force that had helped shape government policy directly for many years.

The agreement was specific. Jaunā Vienotība pledged to work towards implementing the approved schedule of 5.75% annual increases in teachers’ minimum pay between 2027 and 2030. The parties also agreed to review the schedule each year, aiming for average teachers’ pay of at least 120% of the national average wage. Other commitments covered continuing “Programma skolā”, regulating workloads, providing schools with psychologists, speech therapists and special education teachers, and offering professional development for teachers. The parties also agreed to seek the inclusion of education and science among the priorities of the next government’s policy declaration.

Inga Vanaga explained the purpose of these pre-election agreements simply: the union wants parties to make concrete commitments they can later be held to, rather than merely promise improvements before an election.

The election added a certain irony. On 3 October, Jaunā Vienotība won only about 6.4% of the vote and seven seats in the new Saeima, down from the 26 it had won four years earlier. It was the alliance’s worst parliamentary result in recent years. The victorious United List won 41 seats.

Jaunā Vienotība will therefore have considerably less influence than when it helped determine the government’s composition. As of mid-October, coalition talks were still unfinished. The alliance had said it was ready to take part, but with seven MPs it could no longer play the role it had in the previous parliament.

For LIZDA, however, that may not be the central issue. The union does not sign agreements because it wants to support a particular party. Its priority is to make political forces state their positions in advance, then remind them of their commitments after the election.

An ongoing struggle

The strike delivered results. The government had to negotiate. Pay rates rose. The school funding system changed. The union is involved in discussions about working time and has secured delays to changes it considers dangerous. Parties now sign specific agreements with it before elections. But three days on strike could not make every teacher financially secure overnight. They did not eliminate differences between subjects, schools and workloads. Nor was any pay rise guaranteed to last.

As Nelda Ose puts it: “The hourly rate has formally gone up. As far as I can tell, teachers of maths and Latvian, for example, are earning more. In other words, those with a heavy workload are better paid. But nothing has changed for me. The curriculum gives my subject a couple of hours a week. So I was on €900 before, and I’m still on €900. You can live on it, but only with great difficulty.”

That means the union cannot let its guard down. Almost every gain has to be defended again in the next budget, the next reform and under the next government. Latvia’s experience really does resemble a case study in a union activist’s handbook. Its lesson, though, is not that one big strike solved the problem of low pay. It gave the union something else: the ability to make the government and political parties return to the negotiating table again and again.

Then comes the less spectacular, but perhaps equally important, part of union work: turning that power into specific pay rates, working hours, budget allocations and rules, and making sure tomorrow does not take away what was won today.