20110329
reuters

ALGIERS (Reuters) - For nearly two weeks Algerian schoolteacher Hamou Benhamou has spent his days protesting outside the presidential administration and his nights sleeping on a strip of cardboard on the pavement.

The sit-in that Benhamou is holding with about 200 other teachers is one of dozens of protests around the Algerian capital which have unsettled a government wary that unrest elsewhere in the Arab world will spread to Algiers.

The government's tactic so far has been to promise political reform, but also to give handouts to groups who strike or protest, usually over pay and conditions. This has encouraged more demonstrations.

"Everybody's had a pay rise. Why not us? We are teachers," asked Benhamou, 31, who travelled to the protest by bus from his home in Bordj Badji Mokhtar, a town in the Sahara desert about 2,000 km (1,240 miles) from Algiers.

"We are educating the young so we deserve a minimum of attention."

Benhamou is part of a broader wave of protests and strikes that has become a daily phenomenon across all sectors of the economy and all strata of society -- though to date they have not challenged the government's grip on power.

Legal clerks, blind people, oil workers, Muslim clerics, students, doctors, military veterans, municipal police officers and government drivers have all staged protests.