Memórias sobre o parcelamento dos salários na rede de ensino estadual em Santa Maria

Abstract

Salary installments in Rio Grande do Sul were a notable moment in the memory of the precariousness of teaching work, therefore the investigation is carried out with the aim of understanding the teaching profession's interpretations and memories of the period 2015-2021. In this sense, in 2015, a broad neoliberal offensive was launched against the public sector in Rio Grande do Sul, marked by late and delayed payment of Executive Branch employees. To access these memories and political points of view, we need to use the Oral History methodology, producing oral sources with teachers, in semi-structured interviews carried out individually. Our point of view particularly appropriates Maurice Halbwachs' considerations on the collective aspects of memory, as well as Paul Thompson's guidelines and precautions regarding investigation techniques. Furthermore, the notion of professionalization, present in the understanding of Mariano Fernández Enguita, is part of our theoretical perspective, which summarizes the process of social convention evolving towards the valorization of the monopolistic liberal profession, as is the case of the teaching profession and its union struggles. Along with this perspective, we learn from Armando Boito Jr. who elaborates explanations for the ideology of the middle class, their speeches and self-awareness. These theories were intertwined to understand the Rio Grande do Sul teachers as a precarious middle class. In this sense, the dialogue with the bibliography of History of Education, History and Economy allows us to build a more comprehensive notion of what precariousness would be, without reducing it to numbers, but also understanding its subjective scope, weighing the emotional exhaustion arising from social devaluation and the teaching effort as surveyed by Ideb. In addition to academic literature, we have regional newspaper websites and independent media. Through this theoretical debate, it was possible to analyze the trajectory of teaching and the speeches produced at the time of the interview. After two pilot interviews with a questionnaire prototype, five face-to-face interviews were carried out with teachers working in school management, chosen for their relatively easy contact and availability. Finally, the results were interpreted based on some of the most recurrent characters in teaching speeches: (1) an individual experience, markedly heterogeneous in each case; (2) the teacher seen as disunited, dedicated and trapped; (3) governments understood as neoliberal and manipulative; (4) the community, divided between those who regulate the importance of the strike and those who are ungrateful and less enlightened. Thus, professors remember the period of the neoliberal offensive against state civil service, reworking their memories based on elements of middle-class trade unionism, solidarity between peers and critical approaches against the supposed privatist intentions of those in power.