| The
Teaching Profession and Labour Health and Safety - Part 1
Deolidia Martínez,
Education Secretariat, CTERA
Buenos Aires, Argentina
1.
The Current Situation: Teaching Work, Thematic Development and Concrete
Analysis
As we near the end of the
century and of the millennium, education workers are passing through a
long historical and social crisis on a world level, located as we are in
the central nucleus at a time when a significant cultural mutation is taking
place as part of the transition to whatever the next stage will be. We
find ourselves to be both active protagonists and passive subjects in an
inertia that immobilizes us and keeps us from moving forward in the work
of constructing new meanings.
Economic and financial decisions,
taken at a global level in the centres of hegemonic power, throw us off
balance and isolate us in a dependent subordinate position from which the
future looks threatening and unpredictable. Our ability to read the signposts
for constructing historical subjectivity and protagonism has diminished.
Several decades ago, various
social scientists warned us about depleting the "utopian energy"--the social
force that looks toward the future and constructs history. It is very painful
to observe cases in which an educator that has been mutilated in this way,
and who has no utopia in his or her thought process, loses a good deal
of his or her ability to produce knowledge. In this type of situation the
teacher's daily work becomes a closed and defensive space that is absolutely
vulnerable before the globalizing advance of capitalism in crisis.
The accelerated changes produced
in the globalized labour markets, especially in the organization of work
and production, have caused a violent shake-up of the labour environment
and the role of workers' qualifications, both of which had previously been
stabilized at different stages along the way for many working sectors.
Thus, many groups of technicians,
specialized workers, professionals and other types of experts enter the
new world of work, moving from country to country depending on where the
centres of economic and financial power locate their projects in order
to increase their profits or their competitiveness. The automobile and
electronics industries, the communications and informatics systems, the
large regional infrastructure works such as dams, highways and ports, are
all examples of this new circulation of human contingent workers characterized
by a diversity of labour qualifications and nationalities, that have had
their future flexibilized and destabilized, but who are alert to the new
labour opportunities that are offered. This globalized labour sector represents
a pragmatic and expressive feature of the of the labour market.
This is the way "seekers
of job opportunities" are formed: They undergo an accelerated apprenticeship
in survival. They are individualistic and multi-skilled with a very minimal
development in the human values that were present until recently in the
historical development of paid labour. Solidarity and cooperation become
real obstacles to remaining competitive in the marketplace.
Added to this type of labour
market--in which the collective nature of the work process is transitory
and therefore offers few possibilities for organizing among the people
who make up the labour force--are territorial limits that are formed among
nations. These are now identified as regions and go by such names as Mercosur,
the Andean Pact, and NAFTA.
Nevertheless, in addition
to these characteristics, it is also possible to observe a multi-skilling
of qualifications and training experiences that provides for great inter-branch
mobility in industry, services or primary extractive activities for a great
number of people. Having successfully entered very demanding "new worlds",
these people place high value on themselves and on their individual performance,
which is put to the test in arduous daily competition in their jobs.
On the other hand, this situation
has produced a significant loss for the forming and strengthening of unions.
This is not only apparent in the drop in union membership as drastic changes
take place in the traditional types of work and the division of labour
as workers move around the world in search of employment, but also for
the diminishing of awareness in terms of subjectivity and values.
This new world of work rewards
or discards, promotes or destroys values, people and jobs with a total
lack of responsibility with regard to human life, the ecological balance
of the planet and the economic stability of over-populated regions.
At the present time (1999)
deregulation of the stock market is placing large sectors of the banking
and financial world in peril. Some moments when the situation was out of
control have produced great drops in profits for the powerful economic
enclaves. This has created a lack of confidence for the business and financial
sectors who are looking for ways to protect themselves from the future
high-risk global chaos that is threatening the power centres from which
they draw their identity. This is why these sectors are now seeking new
ways of controlling and regulating markets.
The hegemony which was constructed
by force by placing strict discipline on the labour forces of all economic
sectors, cannot contain the resulting social conflict which is tending
to express itself in the weakest areas of society. Repression, in it different
forms, seeks to achieve this. In some regions, adjustments to the budget,
brought about at great social cost in order to sustain private businesses
(which were, in some cases, previously state owned) have left many social
sectors in poverty. In others cases, war or urban violence have taken the
lives and the futures of families without hope.
Capitalism does not have
the answer for resolving its own crisis. That is why conflicts that have
been unleashed through the new relationship between the state and the market
have destabilized the entire public services work force, altering and/or
reducing investment in health and education to the minimum possible for
a large part of the world. These changes affect both workers in the sector
and users of the services. People and workers on both sides of the "window"
are put in a precarious position. The production of social welfare no longer
exists; there is only return on investment and accumulated profit, which
never seems to be enough.
In this context, the problem
of unemployment has dampened the individual and collective expectations
of workers of all economic sectors in every region and territory--even
those that have been more or less favoured in the past by an old and unjust
distribution of wealth that was characterized by steady growth. The search
for market equilibrium in the way that is currently taking place deprives
wage earners of all hope for a better life. Corporate warfare means job
loss. In some regions, if an unskilled worker loses his or her job it is
equivalent to losing one's life. The constant growth in unemployment all
over the world is a painful and visible testimony which, although it may
not have seriously affected the teaching sector directly, is being experienced
by teachers' family members: their adult children, their parents, brothers
and sisters and spouses.
"...In capitalism, the
prolongation of an increasingly empty education, combined with the reduction
of paid work to simple, meaningless tasks, represents a loss of the years
dedicated to education and a loss to human beings of the years to come...."
"...Workers can regain
dominion over collective and socialized production only by assuming the
scientific prerogatives of design and operation of modern engineering,
without which there is no dominion over the process of work...."
Work
and Monopoly Capitalism (1987) by Harry Braverman
The central arguments of
this book by a U.S. worker--a self-taught sociologist who achieved world-wide
rcognition--generated a debate that is still going on (although, unfortunately,
in fewer circles than before) on job training and the possibility of workers
being able to access both knowledge and decent wages. An unequal struggle
for conquering the spaces of appropriation and construction of knowledge
is taking place among different types of contestants in a dual society.
The breech between poor and rich with regard to access to jobs is growing
more irreversible and uncontrollable for workers, placed as we are in a
subordinate position with regard to globalized power. From a hegemonic
position (which is presented as eternal by those who hold it) we are informed
that:
-
The necessary wealth in the
form of "human capital" which each person can use for his or her performance
in the world, is a matter of strength and will. Individual competition
is developed in the private arena, and anyone who wants to can have access
to it.
-
This is the paradigm of liberalism
that the Chicago School presented during the 1960s which was taken
up again in the 1990s by the neoconservatives in order to back-up international
financial policies for compensating the victims of "savage capitalism".
In the field of education it goes by the name "compensatory policies" or
social plans for poor schools.
The public space--and the
idea of "public" as a concept--are being diminished and devalued both in
terms of the services that are offered and the qualifications of the workers
who provide them. This is a site of social conflict.
A slow and, at times, painful
cultural mutation is taking place within the historically socially woven
fabric of municipal spaces, schools and hospitals, and the rural and urban
neighbourhood community centres. The daily life of many social groups,
the relationships between the family and the school, between small merchants,
craftspeople or popular artists and their nearby markets, like that of
doctors and neighbourhood or small-town professionals with their patients,
have now been destabilized like those in the large cities which only a
short time ago it appeared to be the only places where the dehumanization
of accelerated neoliberalism was taking place.
This disequilibrium, which
has entered the lives of people without power, is critical and shows us
that the "cultural capital" has become greatly impoverished. In the groups
in which inter-cultural activity has managed to preserve and care for itself,
the energy it takes to keep up resistance results in a costly victory for
the construction of identity. However, it is in these new-style inter-generational
cultural social movements that we perceive firm responses to the pressure
of the hegemonic social modal.
2.
The Teaching Profession
This brings us to the question:
Where are the teachers in all this, and how are they doing?
Teachers, as always, are
in the schools, in the classrooms, dealing with their assignments,
or carrying out their tasks as principals. All of these are relative secure
and autonomous refuges in which their work is controlled by the disciplinary
hierarchical bureaucratic pressure that comes "from above".
The teaching sector, as a
third tier of the service sector, is experiencing a growing instability
that is as significant as that being experienced by the schools, the hospitals,
the court system, and the other areas of public administration. For teachers,
the loss of labour rights, which is affecting all wage earners, is very
serious since it destabilizes them in their identity as workers--an identity
that was only recently constructed and is still very fragile.
At this time, the effects
of the crisis of capitalism described above have placed pressure on the
education sector in terms of the cultural value of teachers and their professional
qualifications. This is making it difficult for teachers, students and
families to communicate their demands. To talk about what is going on at
the present time is risky. However, it is necessary to do so and to seek
new alliances among the protagonists in education: teachers and students,
family and school, education and society. A public space. A moment in common.
A history to construct.
The work of teaching--both
the concept and the concrete reality--is still an unknown for the science
of work, and even more so for the science of education. Its theoretical
development is as recent as the construction of teachers' identity as workers.
If we take a quick look at past decades, we see that between the 1960s
and the 1980s, some social science researchers began two note two problems
that lacked explanation: an increase in primary and secondary school teachers
seeking mental health care and open criticism of the public schools by
economic sectors for the poor performance of their graduates in the job
market. This was illustrated by similar characteristics in common both
in the capitalist and the communist worlds (before the fall of the Berlin
Wall). We have examined material on this in Cuba (ranging from 1987 to
the present date) that is archived at the Institute of Worker Medicine
of the Ministry of Public Health.
In a 1993 book entitled El
Riesgo de ensenar [The Risk of Teaching], which was published by teachers'
unions in Mexico and Argentina, we delved into this theme and examined
several hypotheses arising from this historical "revelation". The fact
is that teaching work has remained largely invisible. It was necessary
to separate the sickness from that which produces it and to place in context
the protests of the capitalist employer over the greater costs of additional
training for wage earners in order to draw attention to the situation of
workers who are isolated and forgotten in the schools, which serve both
as missions and public services. What we then see is a welfare state in
crisis in both worlds manifesting its woes through the education worker.
A school that was no longer a docile and efficient servant of the hegemonic
power could now be viewed as a bankrupt institution. Since it could no
longer effectively reproduce the desired results, it had to be dismantled.
In our countries, after years
of suffering, the real agenda of the project was finally clearly revealed.
Education reforms were to be a faithful expression of the differentiated
needs of a globalized labour market. The public school was to be one of
the executers of the transition from public to private. In other words,
privatization was meant to place obstacles in the path of socially useful
knowledge and these obstacles were placed for teachers as well as students.
In a dual education system, who gets included and who gets excluded are
of equal importance. In between lies a zona franca where the market cost
of education is negotiated. Both teachers and students must learn to recognize
this.
Under pressure to reach a
consensus, the hegemonic power reformed the state and installed education
and social policies within a heavily downsized budget. In this context,
teachers were employed as the functional mechanism for controlling the
social conflict that was unleashed. The cultural mission of years past
was recycled into mere social control. The deprivation of the public with
regard to access to and appropriation of knowledge with value--for teachers,
professors and students--affected everyone. Social exclusion and a threatening
future violently presented themselves in the schools, the community and
in all of the most vulnerable social groups.
Schools and Teachers Experience
Violence
It is possible to perceive
and place into historical perspective the will and utopian energy and the
type of social and political activities with which teachers resisted and
reconstructed their identities and subjectivity during this crisis.
There are teachers and professors
in the schools who are still recognized for their commitment to the missionary
spirit of years past--sometimes through voluntarism and suffering and sometimes
through passive resistance. There are others who were committed to the
union struggle in the era when teachers were being recognized as workers.
These teachers resisted neoliberal policies using political and social
arguments. Together with parents and students, they demanded rights that
had been lost or pushed aside while they sought a space and time in which
to reclaim their recognition. There is also a group of people who work
as teachers while preparing themselves for better opportunities while they
study for other professions or look for other work. The school is like
no other workplace. Cultural missionaries, education workers and government
employees are all housed in and make up today's public school. With all
of its contradictions and shortcomings, with different and, at times, contradictory
expectations, they are perceived and at times even perceive themselves
as making history. Occasionally, past and present can look at and analyze
themselves. However, to prepare for the future is more difficult.
The development of a mercantile
centre with interest in public services proceeded to take place and many
of the schools were converted into private businesses. The public school
in Latin America became the object of reforms decided upon from the perspective
of economic and financial policy set by such international bodies as the
World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary
Fund. Having had their budgets cut and unsure of whether they would have
the funds to continue on in the future, a sort of poor-peoples' privatization
took place in which parents and teachers began to reinforce the school
by providing it with materials and extra unpaid work.
This type of education reform,
which coincides with and is in harmony with the reform of the state, contributes
to changing teachers back to a type of hierarchical management model practiced
by poor, devalued teaching businesses. The illusion of funding autonomy
is the incentive used for getting directors and steering committees to
submit. The move away from teachers' only recently-assumed labour identity
is encouraged by official bureaucrats who use funding, awards and special
juried grants as a new means of disciplining the "converted small business"
or recently privatized school into poverty. The "Third Sector" is a new
form of "private" subsidized activity that has appeared on the education
scene. It is called the Third Sector in order to differentiate it from
both state and private initiatives. This new model, which is still in the
process of acquiring an identity, takes advantage of competition and individuality,
while exercising authority through the simultaneous use of persuasion and
direct control.
At the same time, well-financed
private enterprises--publishing houses, educational technology and teaching
establishments that are managed like real businesses--are growing, encouraged
by a social duality that has divided the population into segments creating
great distances between those sectors of society that can access socially
valuable knowledge and the "cutting edge" labour market and those who cannot.
A society that is on the way up in social and economic terms reserves a
place for its developing children in the spaces of privilege so as not
to lose ground in the near future. Today it may be the Japanese schools.
Tomorrow it may be the English schools. After that, who knows what the
style may be for preparing people for the immediate future?
In this sense, globalization
has provoked a territorial reorganization that goes beyond national projects
in determining regional education reforms that guarantee the training and
circulation of a specialized, value-added labour force that is in keeping
with production needs and the business and financial world.
The teaching labour force,
which is trapped in a circuit of unskilled labour, is in the "other world".
It is ignorant of, or at best, can only gaze from a distance on the changes
that are taking place in the privileged part of the labour market. It suffers
from the deterioration of all things public, in terms of achieving neither
realization from its work nor recognition for what it produces. As a product,
in addition to the containment of social conflict (expressed dramatically
at times in a struggle of the poor against the poor in competition for
illusory goods) what the state employer wants is to Keep Registration Up.
Thus expressed, in strictly administrative terms, we can really see what
the employer expects of teachers in exchange for the salary it pays.
The financial objective of
the budget is to reduce education costs. In public education, no investment
is made and no economic risk is taken. Students should pass through the
system without obstacles in their way. They should pass all examinations.
To be left behind increases costs. Students should be passed to the next
grade and graduate at the expected age. The studies that have been carried
out by the private consultants the governments have hired suggest how to
measure the schools' efficiency: Schools gain points if students are at
the level they should be for their age. They lose points if this is not
the case because this indicates a failure in terms of cost calculations.
In fact, the best and most
difficult achievements on the part of the school in terms of effective
teaching and learning are not reflected in budget line items. It is impossible
to register their value and they are not the product-result of the educational
system. In the management/mercantilist view of schools, productivity is
measured in terms of controlling the population at the lowest possible
cost, with students passing from one grade to the next and receiving accreditation.
The content of the work and the product that is produced are of no interest.
School evaluation is not used for improving the system, or for placing
value on or extending qualification to teachers and learners. For the government,
the measures of quality for education are a control mechanism for arbitrarily
establishing the level of learning the students have "objectively" reached,
without "objectively" taking into account all of the variables of context
and the conditions in which teachers are working.
It is in this sense that
we focus on the real product of the work of teaching, which is expressed
as knowledge about how to teach, documentation of practices, and the historical
experience processed in the school, all of which vanishes and is frequently
lost in the individual memory of the teacher who carries it out or the
students that experienced it.
This lack of interest in
the genuine achievement of teachers and professors lies outside of the
of the measurements of teaching quality utilized by official entities.
To take it into consideration would reveal the deficient conditions in
which teachers are working. It would be especially problematic to recognize
that the work may be organized to take into account individual variables,
which could have the effect of holding back collective work, which would
reveal the progressive loss of control over the work process, and, as a
consequence, over its product: Knowledge about the school and about teaching.
What is being described here
illustrates one of the most negative aspects of teachers' working conditions
as well as for the development and consolidation of the sector, its internal
cohesion and its prospective social strength. Since teachers are isolated
from each other and evaluated individually, encouraging competition among
them has the effect of impeding the type of collective achievement that
reinforces labour identity and self-value. It leads to a future of defeat
due to the effects of the weight of bureaucratic inertia on the schools,
and a situation in which the schools lack the autonomy to solve their own
problems.
Control over the work process
is weakened and the production of knowledge about teaching and the school
is becoming more scarce, lacking, as it does, time and opportunities for
systematizing and circulating such information. The sharing of knowledge
about teaching is pretty much reduced to oral transmission. Access to publication
is largely denied to public school teachers. When such work does exist,
it is not usually recognized as a collective product and the process is
difficult for the authors to reconstruct. In some cases, publicly owned
publishing ventures have been converted into private businesses. The unity
that exists between concrete work and education is hard to identify in
the education system as it is currently organized. In order to advance
to the concept of teacher as product and collective authorship, it is necessary
to abandon the model "teacher-executer".
In recent years, we have
progressed in the construction of a conceptual relationship which permits
us to work at teacher training in a way that seeks to unite and integrate
elements that are separate in the education system. Thus, we relate curriculum-building
to school organization and working conditions in an attempt to unite theory
and practice in the concrete daily activities of teachers. Each term relates
to the others and they cannot be approached separately. Research and analysis
on teaching production permits the union to develop a strategy of struggle
aimed at achieving improvement and recognition for the value of the work
of teaching. |
