Research Information System
40th International Labour Process Conference Labour Mobility and Mobilization of Workers, Padua, Italy, 21 - 23 April 2022, pp.217
The Coronavirus pandemic
affected certain sectors significantly and education is among these sectors.
Especially in the early days of the pandemic, the schools were shut down in
most of the countries, including Turkey. Although the shift to online education
prevented a severe interruption at the university level, with the help of new
technologies; for younger students, the adaptation to digitalization came at a
slower pace and was experienced more unequally. This process was even harder
for preschool children. For most of the private preschools, command over new
technologies became a prerequisite, while the duty of childcare is now combined
with healthcare under pandemic conditions, as these institutions were among the
first reopened places. The service provided by the nurseries has never been
limited to education, but it got much more complicated due to the pandemic. The
burden here is on the shoulders of mostly female and mostly young nursery
teachers, who have already been working under increasingly precarious
conditions in Turkey. The covid provided a new pretext for their short-term
contracts, high workloads, and irregular working hours. This article focuses on
the experiences of nursery teachers in Turkey during the pandemic. Based on 25
in-depth interviews, conducted with female nursery teachers under the age of 30,
working on non-permanent contracts in private nurseries/preschools; it analyses
changing dynamics of work within these places, changing relationship of these
teachers with labour market, and their changing everyday experiences. It is
suggested that the pandemic not only increased mobility of young teachers in and
out of the jobs, but also worsened the working conditions during their
employment due to new forms of pressures. In addition, taking over some of the
burden of social reproduction, their contribution to the labour market is
beyond and above what they get out of it. The article also underlines how the
reproduction of gender inequality is linked to the composition of the labour
market, especially in the countries of the Global South.