Teachers’ strikes in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico (2012-2022)

GINDIN JULIÁN; MARIANO CASCO PEEBLES; BECHER PABLO ARIEL

Pennsylvania

Simposio; Globalisation, Societies, and Education Special Issue: Teachers? Unions, Educator Organizing, and Global Struggles for Educational Justice; 2023

Pennsylvania State University

In this paper, we use statisticaldata on strikes to analyze and compare teacher mobilizations in Argentina,Brazil and Mexico. We focus on elementary and secondary teachers between 2012and 2022. In the cases of Argentina and Brazil,we use the databases on labor unrest of the Ministry of Labor (MTEySS, Argentina)and of the Inter-union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (DIEESE,Brazil).They are databases fed with journalistic and union’s information. In the caseof Mexico, where there are no bases of this type we use statistical data on teacherstrikes produced by ourselves from journalistic information. The concept of labor regime,originally proposed by Michael Burawoy (as “factory regime”), pretends to studythe relationship between capital, state and work. In the contemporaryunderstanding of this concept, a labor regime is the combination of socialrelations and institutions that bind capital and labor in a form ofantagonistic relative stability in particular times and places (Baglioni,Campling, Coe and Smith, 2022, p.1). Labour regime is a mid-range operationalconcept (Peck, 2022) que destaca, a partir del análisis de situacionesconcretas, regularidades y características estructurantes de las formas detrabajo. This approach integrates class, gender, race, ethnicity and, in general,the relations of domination andsubordination into the analysis of concrete forms of production andreproduction of the workforce.