Enforcing Markets with Violence: The Hypervisible Militaristic Response to Striking Teachers in Rio de Janeiro

• In Event: The Visibility and Invisibility of State Governance: A Critical Analysis of Educational Policy and Development Educational Initiatives (Panel 2 of 2)

Proposal

In 2013, Rio de Janeiro’s public school teachers went on strike when the municipal government changed their payscale. The strike lasted two and a half months, with numerous public marches and demonstrations and one occupation of a city government building by striking teachers and their supporters. The municipal administration at the time was led by Eduardo Paes, a market-oriented technocrat who is a strong supporter of public-private partnerships and the involvement of the private sector in municipal administration. His education secretary at the time, Claudia Costin, embraced a similar philosophy. Indeed, the proposed payscale change that triggered this strike was one that strongly embraced market logic—it involved an ostensible salary increase, but only to teachers who worked a full 40-hour week in the same school. At the time, most Rio de Janeiro’s schools operated on a scaled schedule, in which students attend classes during the morning, afternoon or evening, rather than a full seven-hour block. As a result, this raise would only apply to 10% of the municipality’s teaching faculty—and any others who, feeling incentivized by this salary change, chose to move to the 40 hour/week schedule. The city, through this market incentive, was working to transition all city teachers to 40-hour schedules, though it was strongly opposed by most city teachers, as the change made salaries unfairly unequal during the transition period to full-time, and forced teachers to accept a schedule change that would drastically alter their current workloads and open themselves up to the possibility of losing their jobs.
Drawing on 26 participant observations of the 2.5-month strike and interviews with 10 striking teachers, I here argue that city leaders’ market-oriented decision-making reflects a fundamental epistemological disconnect with the student-centric values of striking teachers, one that was made more and more clear as over the course of the strike the administrative response to the strike became more militaristic and violent, with the deployment of shock troops to disperse striking teachers and their supporters. While the Paes administration preferred and tried to incentivize changes to public educational administration in the city through market forces in a way that naturalized the idea of running government like a business, the escalating resistance to that governmental model over the course of the strike by teachers and community members revealed a deep epistemological divide between the government and the governed. In this paper I will further explore how the use of hypervisible military force on the part of the Paes administration to enforce market logic undercuts the notion that running governments like businesses is a more natural and seamless way to administer the state.

Author

• Rolf Straubhaar, Texas State University