Between Job Insecurity and the Regulation of the Teaching Workday

Two years after the beginning of the confinement and social distancing caused by the COVID-19 health emergency that kept students and teachers of all educational levels at home, it is important to reflect on its impact on the teaching-learning processes, but also on the implications that this phenomenon had on the working and professional development conditions of public basic education teachers. The purpose of this paper is to show how the lack of a policy to regulate the online teaching workday, which accompanied the educational programs during the pandemic, led to flexible and precarious work practices, with a strong component of loss of labor and personal rights. Now, in the post-pandemic context, these conditions persist in the daily teaching practice of basic education teachers.

Research advances are presented in which the main effects caused by the pandemic and the social confinement in educational policy, specifically in the regulation of the teaching day and its impact on teaching, are described from a mixed methodological perspective, in which a survey was applied to 370 participants teachers and 30 in-depth interviews were conducted in the northern state of Chihuahua in México. The study focuses mainly on the analysis of the entry of flexible and precarious work practices and the deregulation of the teaching day, originated within the framework of the Aprende en Casa program, as a process that gives continuity to the precariousness and uncertainty of labor trajectories in the Mexican public teaching profession. Thus, this paper proposes, through the systematization of the labor implications of the post-pandemic regulation of the teaching day, an analysis of public teaching work in Mexico with a view to reflecting on the long-term labor and professional development conditions of public basic education teachers.