GAFSA — The General Federation of Mines, affiliated to the UGTT, filed a strike notice on Monday for a three-day general strike across every site of the Gafsa Phosphate Company (CPG) from 1 to 3 September. The notice was sent to the Minister of Industry, Energy and Mines, the Minister of Social Affairs, the secretary general of the government, the head of the labour inspectorate and conciliation service, and the CPG's own director general.

The demands set out in the notice are almost entirely about commitments already made. The federation is asking for the immediate application of all minutes of meetings and agreements already concluded; the application of agreed wage increases; an increase in the end-of-career indemnity to match the level paid at the Tunisian Chemical Group; a four percent rise in the compensation allowance; and the integration of the 2015, 2016 and 2017 wage increases into the base salary of all staff. Members of the mining sector council, meeting on 30 June, had already voted to resort to a strike if management and the supervising ministry did not respond to a request for a working meeting.

None of these are new claims. Three of them concern raises negotiated between eight and eleven years ago that have still not been folded into base pay.

Why this dispute is not only about wages

The CPG is not an ordinary employer. It is the sole producer of Tunisian phosphate rock, the upstream supplier to the Tunisian Chemical Group, and — through phosphate derivatives — a significant contributor to export earnings at a moment when the trade deficit reached 14.96 billion dinars by the end of July, more than half of it energy. It is also the principal formal employer in a governorate where the mining basin's unemployment rate has been among the country's highest for two decades.

That combination is precisely what makes the dispute recurrent. Because the CPG is the only large employer in the region and the only source of the raw material downstream, both sides have leverage and neither has an exit. Production has been interrupted repeatedly since 2011 by sit-ins, road and rail blockades and strikes, and output has never returned durably to pre-2010 levels. The Economiste Maghrébin reported in December 2025 that the company had again missed its annual production targets.

The state's answer has been a plan rather than a settlement. In June, the CPG and the Tunisian Chemical Group presented a strategy costed at 2.7 billion dinars aiming to raise commercial phosphate production to 9.4 million tonnes by 2035, with an intermediate target of five million tonnes by 2028. The plan addresses equipment, washing plants, logistics and new deposits. It does not address the industrial-relations file that has cost the company more production days than any equipment failure.

The gap the plan does not cover

There is a structural mismatch here worth naming plainly. A capital-investment plan can be announced by ministers and financed over a decade. An agreement on back-dated wage increases has to be signed, budgeted and executed by a company whose finances are themselves the subject of the union's demands — the federation is also asking for measures to improve the CPG's financial situation and guarantee its viability. The union, in other words, is not only asking to be paid; it is asking the state to fix the balance sheet that explains why it has not been.

Neither the industry ministry nor the CPG's management had publicly responded to the notice by Monday evening.

What could break the cycle

Two approaches have been put forward by people who follow the sector. The first is procedural: a published, dated implementation calendar for agreements already signed, with a joint monitoring committee including the labour inspectorate, so that compliance becomes verifiable rather than contested. This is the mechanism the federation itself is implicitly demanding when it asks for the "immediate application of all minutes and agreements".

The second is financial and comes from the revival plan's own logic. If the CPG's inability to honour past agreements is a cash-flow problem rather than a refusal, then sequencing matters: the 2.7-billion-dinar programme presented in June commits public money to capacity, and stakeholders have argued that a defined tranche should be earmarked for clearing legacy salary liabilities first, on the grounds that no investment in washing plants produces tonnes if the workforce is not at the site.

The legal notice period runs to 1 September. That leaves two weeks for a working meeting that the sector council has been requesting since June.