On February 5th teachers across Zimbabwe began an indefinite general strike for pay and conditions, joining doctors and nurses already taking action against poverty pay.
With inflation running at over 1,200% (the worst in the world), dictator Robert Mugabe is keeping public sector workers' wages down in order to have enough money to keep his regime afloat.

With as many as 80% of Zimbabweans unemployed, the poverty and health situation is dire. But the pay of hard-pressed medical staff is falling sharply - they have now been on strike for six weeks in reaction. The army has been brought in to supervise student nurses.

Teachers, paid just £9 a month, are often unable even to afford the bus fare to work - their wage is barely one-fifth of the government's own figures for an income on which an ordinary family could meet its basic survival needs. Teachers are fighting bravely to obtain a living wage - this in the face of a government determined to crush any sign of a workers' movement.

In one recent incident, 22 miners’ wives in the village of Shurugwi went to a police station to ask permission to hold protest about the miners' wages. Their request rejected, the women started to walk back towards the bus stop. Before they got there, the police chased them down, arrested them and locked them up in the cells for the night.
The miners' wives — several pregnant and some with babies — were let out the next morning after paying "admission-of-guilt fines".
The police alleged that "the women walking together to the bus stop constituted an illegal demonstration".

In this atmosphere, the regime is heavily reliant on the military's support if it is to "keep order". But even the recent 800% rise in army pensions and the relatively high wages of soldiers (army privates are paid twice as much as teachers) are not preventing chronic desertion and absenteeism from the armed forces. Soldiers are increasingly unwilling to defend the government against the people whose poverty they share.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions - 15 of whose members are demanding compensation for being tortured by the regime after a demonstration last September - has given the government until February 23rd to address pay grievances of doctors and teachers or face a general strike by workers across the country. It is clear that the country faces an explosion of popular anger against the tyrannical regime and its economic chaos.