Support Resisting Teacher in Tükiye!
“Under the leadership of the Private Sector Teachers’ Union, teachers working in private educational institutions and our teachers who have been victims of the interview system have been resisting in Ankara since June 14 to secure the restoration of their revoked rights, to defend their professional dignity, and to attain a humane life.
Our teachers, whose appointment rights—hard-won through great effort—have been usurped by the interview system, preventing them from practicing their profession; who have been condemned to work for minimum wage in private educational institutions; whose labor has been devalued; and who have been pushed into precarity through fixed-term contracts—are now being subjected to assault, dragged on the ground, and taken into custody with reverse handcuffs when they try to voice their demands in front of the Ministry of National Education and the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in order to break free from this spiral of exploitation.
We reject the violence and oppression inflicted upon education workers who seek to raise their voices by exercising their democratic rights in the face of the deep precarity and rights violations they are subjected to!
The working conditions imposed on teachers are a direct consequence of the rapid marketization of all levels of education—including universities—in Türkiye, whereby education has been stripped of its status as a public right and transformed into a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. In 2002, there were 1,887 private schools across Türkiye; by 2026, this number has reached 14,700, while the share of private schools within the total number of schools has risen from 4% to 20%. While the owners of private educational institutions have grown wealthy through VAT exemptions, customs duty exemptions, land allocation, tax reductions, employer insurance premium supports, and interest or profit-share subsidies, education workers have been condemned to unemployment, precarity, poverty, and a futureless existence.
The problems faced by teachers in private educational institutions are not limited to wages alone. Education workers are employed for ten months of the year through fixed-term contracts, spending the remaining two months without pay or insurance, while being deprived of severance pay rights and living under the constant threat of dismissal year after year. Their trade union rights are effectively obstructed by the ‘umbrella’ structure of Collective Agreement Branch No. 10, which encompasses disparate and unrelated fields of work under ‘Trade, Office, Education and Fine Arts.’
Today, the teachers in Ankara—who have resorted to hunger strike as a last resort to make their voices heard—are striving to keep the teaching profession alive, to remind society of what belongs to the public, and to make possible an equal and free education and science. For this reason, this resistance must be not only the resistance of interview-victim teachers and private-sector teachers, but of all of us. As the academics and researchers whose signatures appear below, we adopt our teachers’ demands as our own and address the government:
- The ‘Base Salary’ law, repealed in 2014, must be re-enacted!
- The interview system in appointments must be abolished, and the 1,611 teachers who have been victims of the interview system must be appointed!
- The employment of teachers in private educational institutions on fixed-term contracts must be ended!
- Collective Agreement Branch No. 10 must be reorganized according to professions, and the structural barriers to trade union rights must be removed!
We salute our comrades in struggle who are now on the seventh day of their hunger strike in Ankara, and we call upon all academics and independent researchers to expand solidarity.
Long live the united struggle of education and science workers!
