The gates of the Tataouine Environment, Planting and Horticulture Company (Société de l’Environnement, de la Plantation et de l’Horticulture de Tataouine) known locally as just “the Environment Company,” have intermittently opened and closed for the better part of seven years. Founded in 2015 with just a few dozen workers, the number of employees on its books increased with the 2017 El Kamour agreement, becoming the largest employer in Tunisia’s southernmost governorate. That agreement was a concession from the central government following protests and strikes to invest the profits of locally extracted hydrocarbons back into the community. But nearly every month, workers wait for wages that arrive late, if at all, and officials regularly promise that they will start abiding by the terms of the agreement.
The latest round of negotiations began in early July 2026, when the governor of Tataouine, Amir Gabsi, summoned the company’s CEO and union representatives to his office, alongside a member of the National Council of Regions and Districts (the upper house of Tunisia’s parliament, established by the 2022 Constitution, with 77 indirectly elected members who shape regional development plans and share legislative powers) and the head of Tataouine’s regional police district (appointed by the Interior Ministry in Tunis), a lineup indicating that a seemingly simple dispute over payroll must travel high up the chain of state officials before anyone with enough authority is able to address the issue. Officials confirmed that April and May wages had finally been paid and promised June’s would follow the next day. It was not the first such promise, and workers were unimpressed: punctual payment of a single month’s salary, some told Meshkal, does nothing to resolve a crisis that is structural, not seasonal.
A company born of a promise
To understand why a landscaping and environmental-maintenance company has become one of the most controversial employers in southern Tunisia, it helps to go back to the Kamour sit-in of 2017, when young men from a region that produces roughly a fifth of the country’s gas and close to half its oil shut down the pumping station that transports hydrocarbons out of the desert. Locals took that action demanding that some of that wealth be returned to benefit the people of the region. The government eventually signed an agreement that promised jobs and development: specifically the recruitment over two years of 3000 workers in the recently founded state owned company – the Environment Company.
According to Mbarek Sayari, deputy secretary-general of the company’s base union branch in Tataouine-North, the state recruited 1500 workers to the Environment Company in January 2018 and another 1000 workers in April 2019, bringing the total to around 2500. Another Kamour agreement with locals in 2020 promised recruitment of another 1000 workers, a recruitment process that elicited 24,000 applications. That brought the total promised jobs up to 4000, but actual recruitment did not greatly exceed 2500. Several employees have since left the company, including migrating informally to Europe because of non-payments of salaries and uncertainty around the future of the company, bringing the company’s workforce to about 2300, according to Sayari.
Tataouine was not the first governorate where the Tunisian state established an environment company as a solution to unemployment and protest. The first Environmental, Planting, and Horticulture Companies in Tunisia was established in 2008 as a direct socio-economic response to the Gafsa Mining Basin protests, aiming to absorb youth unemployment and defuse rising social tensions in industrial regions. Initially funded as a temporary solution by state enterprises like the Gafsa Phosphate Company (CPG), these public entities expanded rapidly between 2011 and 2017 to other southern provinces like Gabès, Kebili, and Tataouine, with additional co-funding from oil and gas companies.
Tataouine has one of the highest unemployment rates in Tunisia, reaching an estimated 29 percent overall and close to 58 percent among university graduates in 2017, even as its subsoil is drilled for hydrocarbons. The Environment Company was meant to be a small correction to that. The majority of the Environment Company’s workers are assigned to roles within the governorate’s public administration such as school supervisors, administrative staff, engineers, and security personnel, and its gross monthly payroll approximately 3.3 million Tunisian dinars, according to Sayari. Amidst regular hiring freezes in the public sector, the Environment Company has filled those gaps.
But while the company’s recruitment has made a small impact on unemployment, workers say that it has often behaved less like an employer and more like an unresponsive state benefits fund, paralleling the same neglect the Kamour movement was protesting against in the first place. Since January 2024, ETAP, the Tunisian National Oil and Gas Company and thus far the sole funder of the Environment Company, has transferred only around two thirds of the monthly payroll and, to cover the payroll, the Environment Company has been forced to accrue debts of some 50 million dinars, according to Sayari.
Seven years of the same sit-in
The question of monthly missed payments now takes a familiar pattern. In June and September 2020, workers occupied the governorate headquarters, this time demanding salary increases that other workers in the public administration and other regional environment companies in Gabes, Sfax and Kebili received, and over legally-mandated salary raises never paid out for 2017 through 2019, according to Sayari. In January 2025, an open-ended sit-in began again, this time with participants explicitly demanding implementation of a November 5, 2020, agreement, reclassification of the company’s status from its current ambiguous status to under the Ministry of Agriculture, a salary increase, and retroactive pay stretching all the way back to 2015 and 2016. By February 2025, the strike had not ended; it had simply moved, from the company’s front gate to a march on the governorate.
What is notable is not any single flashpoint but the repetition of state failure and worker protest. Each round produces the same partial concession, a delayed month’s wages released, a meeting convened, a promise renewed, and each concession appears to dissolve, sometimes within weeks, into the next sit-in. The regional branch of the UGTT, Tunisia’s main labor federation, issued a statement backing the workers and warning that any further delay by the authorities in finding real solutions risked deepening tensions in the region, language nearly identical to a UGTT statement issued over the same company back in 2019.
“Legitimate demands”
The failure of the Environment Company to provide a reliable salary to its workers is rarely reported in Tunisian and international media. This is because fewer journalists work in Tunisia’s south, but also due to an assumption that Environment Company employees contribute little to the country. The Environment company model has faced severe criticism and structural strain, with critics arguing the company operates in a legal vacuum where thousands of workers receive salaries without clear daily tasks or measurable economic output, causing heavy financial deficits for their parent companies.
Mbarek Sayari, the deputy secretary-general of the company’s base union branch in Tataouine-North, rejects this characterization. Sayari has become the most vocal proponent of the workers’ demands and his statements to Tunisian press across more than a year track the arc of the crisis almost month by month. In January 2025, he told TAP that the sit-in’s central demands were implementation of the November 5, 2020 agreement, the company’s overdue reclassification to part of the Ministry of Agriculture, a salary increase, back pay for 2015 and 2016. He also said at the time every union structure inside the company had voted unanimously for an open strike to protest what he called the marginalization and procrastination of local authorities, including a “day of anger” outside company headquarters on January 13, 2025, one of a continuing series of such protests.
Workers at the company, Sayari told Meshkal, live in a state of constant uncertainty, despite the important role they play in the life of the city. The company employs some 2,300 workers deployed across all municipalities, public administrations, and schools throughout the governorate. Part of this workforce—about 500 workers—maintains green spaces, public buildings, and grounds. That work has paid off, with Tataouine receiving an award from the President of the Republic for the cleanest governorate in 2025. However the majority of the company’s workers, around 1,800, are placed as core staff within state institutions, filling positions left vacant by the government’s ongoing hiring freeze.
Company officials, for their part, have tended to publicly address the next disbursement rather than potential structural fixes, a gap that workers say is precisely the problem. Mohamed (whose name has been changed for anonymity), has worked as a security guard in public administration. Mohamed told Meshkal that he gets little enjoyment from his job and finds it repetitive, but he has few other options. Mohamed wants, one day, to have saved enough money to open a small business, but this is hampered by irregular payments in his current role.
Mohamed has spent long enough inside the company’s payroll cycle to know exactly how a delay unfolds and its impact on his family. First, the murmured warnings among coworkers that the transfer hasn’t landed. Then comes the household calculation: which bills can wait, which cannot. Then the sit-in tents go up again outside the gate, by now as familiar as the changing of the seasons. For Mohamed, the latest delays coincided with celebrations for Eid al-Adha, and he was couldn’t afford the traditional purchase of a sheep to sacrifice.
He is old enough to remember when the company’s creation, in the wake of the Kamour agreement, felt like a genuine correction, proof that a shutdown pumping station in the desert could be converted into a payroll. He is also old enough to have watched the door that opened for him seven years ago start to slowly close. Younger colleagues who grow frustrated with the company’s rhythm of delayed wages and unmet promises have options he no longer has: many have left for Europe, joining the flow of irregular migration through the Balkan road, that has pulled a generation of young Tunisian men out of towns like his own. With a household depending on him, that isn’t an option for Mohamed. He is left instead to do what his union has been doing since 2019: wait, protest, and wait again. For now, the July disbursements have quieted the loudest part of the protest without resolving what workers say is the real question, not whether a given month’s wages get paid, but whether a company built out of a regional development promise can be relied upon to function like an employer at all. That question has outlived at least three governors, several rounds of union leadership, and one formal agreement already meant to have settled that in 2020.
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