Teachers affiliated with Morocco’s National Education Union staged a protest outside the Education Ministry on Sunday, demanding that Saturday become an official day off for teaching staff and that weekly classroom hours be reduced to 18.
The union said requiring teachers to work on Saturdays conflicts with a 2005 decree setting the public-sector workweek from Monday to Friday, though the Education Ministry has not publicly responded to that interpretation.
Ezzeddine Amami, the union’s national secretary-general, told Hespress that Saturday work should only be imposed in exceptional circumstances and argued that no such necessity existed in the education sector.
He said the current workload was introduced alongside additional “solidarity hours” and was no longer justified, pointing to schools operating triple-shift systems where teachers work 18 hours a week while still completing the curriculum.
The union called on the government to apply the 18-hour ceiling across primary, lower-secondary and upper-secondary education without waiting for changes to the national curriculum.
Protesters also demanded retroactive payment of a MAD 500 supplementary allowance to teachers excluded from the benefit since January 2025.
Abdelhalim Amine, the union’s deputy national secretary, said primary and lower-secondary teachers had been left out despite representing most of the country’s teaching workforce.
He said the exclusion created unequal treatment between education staff and encouraged teachers to seek transfers into professional categories offering better compensation.
The protest, held under the slogan “The Last Breath,” came as education employees continued signing end-of-year administrative departure records.
The union urged the ministry to resume dialogue and implement outstanding commitments to education workers.
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