One of the Turkey's largest private school chains (Doga Schools) (Yücel 2014), totaling over 200 schools and employing approximately three thousand teachers, went bankrupt in 2019 and its teachers did not get paid for five months. We interviewed teachers of different campuses in three major cities (Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir) during the time of crisis (Dec. 2019), when uncertainties were looming over their personal careers and schools’ futures. Here, we will discuss the dramatic course of events, placing these in the wider context of neoliberal policies (see Robertson 2008). In Turkey, the first attempts toward neoliberal macroeconomic reorganization emerged in the 70’s, but were hindered by strongly organized labour. The 1980 coup d’etat swept away labour resistance and immediately started neoliberal transformations under the guidance of IMF, WB and later the EU (alike other peripheral countries such as Chile and Greece; Gönenç/Durmaz 2020). Still, it was not until the 2000’s that the private school sector gained a significant position in Turkey’s education system. After a politically and economically turbulent period of the 1990’s, in 2002 Erdogan’s JDP came to power, and promoted private schools using overwhelmingly public funds (Nohl/Somel 2020). In parallel, the laws regulating employment conditions of private school teachers were changed in favor of private school owners: e.g. the provision that private school teachers could not be paid less than their counterparts in public schools was lifted in 2014, leading to the minimum wage becoming the norm. In addition, teachers working at the private schools were obliged to precarious working conditions, where the state turned a blind eye to unlawful layoffs and mobbing, and where the number of unemployed teachers has been growing every year (almost half a million in 2019). Thus, Doga Schools’ teachers faced a multifaced problem during the schools’ bankruptcy in 2019: they were not organized, the Ministry of Education remained mostly indifferent to their problem, and were scared of resigning due to high unemployment risk. Meanwhile, the schools’ administrations were pressuring teachers to continue working as usual until the problem would be solved, while the teachers were trying to build counter pressure to get paid. Here we elaborate on the teachers’ strategies using narrative interviews (Schütze 1983) analysed by the Documentary Method (Bohnsack 2007), and describe how they searched for and discovered ways to collectively defend their rights.

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