ŁÓDŹ, Poland — The physics lab at High School No. 3 in Łódź was dark on Friday morning, and Krzysztof Nowicki, who has taught in it for 16 years, stood outside the gate with a thermos of tea and a hand-lettered sign. “I earn less than the man who installed our new windows,” he said. “I don’t begrudge him that. I begrudge the ministry.”
Mr. Nowicki, 41, was one of an estimated 310,000 teachers who walked off the job on Friday in the largest school strike in Poland since 2019, when a 19-day stoppage ended without a deal and left a residue of bitterness that never fully dissolved. The Polish Teachers’ Union, the country’s largest, said 78 percent of public schools were closed or operating only as day care; the Education Ministry put the figure at 54 percent.
The union is demanding a 20 percent across-the-board raise and a starting salary of 5,400 zloty a month before tax, about 1,260 euros, up from 4,908. The government has offered 7 percent, which it says is all the 2027 budget can bear after two years of double-digit increases for the armed forces. “We respect teachers, and we have shown it with the largest raises in a generation,” said Paweł Lisowski, a spokesman for the Education Ministry. “But there is no magic drawer of money.”
The union’s president, Dorota Szymańska, countered that the earlier raises had barely kept up with inflation and that the profession was emptying out. By the ministry’s own count, 14,200 teaching posts were unfilled at the start of the school year, and the average age of a Polish teacher is now 48. “A country that cannot find a math teacher for a town of 20,000 people has a problem that 7 percent does not solve,” Ms. Szymańska told a rally of several thousand strikers in Warsaw’s Castle Square.
Parents were, for the most part, sympathetic but strained. In Łódź, a city of 650,000 with a large working-class population, employers reported staff taking emergency leave to watch children. Agnieszka Dudek, 37, a logistics coordinator, brought her 9-year-old son to the office. “I support them, I do,” she said. “Ask me again on Tuesday.”
The strike is open-ended, and the union has said it will not return to talks unless the offer rises above 12 percent. The ministry has invited the union to a meeting on Monday but has not changed its proposal. Analysts noted that the government, which depends on urban, educated voters who tend to sympathize with teachers, has limited room to let the dispute drag on. “The 2019 strike broke on the exam season,” said Bartosz Kaczmarek, who studies public-sector labor at the University of Łódź. “This one starts in October. Nobody has a calendar on their side.”
As the rally in Warsaw dispersed, Mr. Nowicki boarded a train back to Łódź. He planned to be at the gate again on Monday. “I have Monday’s lesson prepared,” he said. “Projectile motion. It will keep.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 7 of the European edition with the headline: Polish Teachers Walk Out in the Biggest School Strike in Seven Years.
