Transformation of working life and paid teacher labor

The basic dynamics of the globalization process and neoliberal policies have created transformations at the level of nation-states as well as at the global level. In these transformations, which also mean the adaptation of the economies of nation-states to neoliberalism, supranational organizations as well as MNCs have been decisive, and the conditions and process of this adaptation have been determined by international agreements. With neoliberal policies, which simply means the relative withdrawal of the state from producing goods and services, basic public services have also been opened to market activity. Therefore, public services such as health and education have been opened to the private sector through marketization and liberalization practices, or it has been made possible for the state to operate the basic dynamics of market mechanisms in service provision. With this transformation, paid teaching, which was implemented to eliminate the teacher shortage in the social welfare process, has been institutionalized as flexible and insecure employment in the neoliberal process. The new individual type constructed by neoliberalism reproduces some forms of social relations in accordance with the flexible and precarious structure of the labor process. In this way, the process of fragmentation and alienation that occurs in the labor process has been carried into daily life as the area where social relations take place. Therefore, paid teachers, as neo-teachers, also experience the effects of this transformation in their labor process and daily lives. The field research of this study, which problematizes the transformative effect of neoliberal policies on the labor processes of paid teachers and their manifestations in daily life, was carried out by in-depth interviews with 27 paid teachers working in Aydın province.