Öğretmenler eylemde: Türkiye'deki özel sektör öğretmenleri sendikası (2021-2025)

This thesis examines the emergence, strategies, and transformative effects of the Private Sector Teachers' Union (PSTU) in Turkey's private education sector between 2021 and 2025. It argues that sectoral conditions—deregulation and precarization—both constrained and enabled militant, innovative unionism. In the absence of enforceable collective bargaining, PSTU assembled a disruptive, public-facing repertoire: school-front protests, sit-ins and social-media campaigning. Through worker-to-worker organizing, the union scaled rapidly up across sector. Findings show multi-level transformations that I analyze at three levels: individual, organizational and sectoral. Individually, teachers developed confidence, solidarity, and durable collective efficacy through PSTU's mobilization. Organizationally, PSTU expanded and got more consolidated but also experienced a process of institutionalization, risking strategic flexibility. Sectorally, the union heightened public awareness regarding the precarity of teachers, and compelled some re-regulatory moves. This study uses Burawoy's extended case method, in-depth interviews, and participant observation to locate everyday organizing practices within broader political-economic dynamics, and conceptually, Hyman's strategic triangle and Blanc's worker-to-worker organizing model. Overall, the thesis contributes to labor revitalization debates by showing that, even under authoritarian neoliberalism, grassroots and independent unions can innovate, mobilize, and reshape the terrain of labor politics.