Knowledge companies and job insecurity in Chilean higher education

Gabriel Boric’s government program (2022-2026) projects a series of transformations in different areas of state institutions and civil society. And among the organizations that need to be reconsidered is the Chilean Higher Education, urgently. Since its dismantling, carried out by the Dictatorship, its main problems have not been remedied. One of them is the structural precariousness in working conditions that strongly affects professional development in Chilean Higher Education at all levels. Even after the enactment of a Higher Education Law (Law 21.091), which was to mitigate these uncertainties by promoting a civil service career and improving working conditions, the situation persists without fundamentally altering.
The causes of this problem are multiple. On the one hand, its main reason is economic, since the shortage of stable and basal financing for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is endemic, on the other, there are still legal loopholes that have not been modified as Decrees with the Force of Law that support organic elements within universities. In addition, mention could be made of the institutional management and lack of political will of university governments. Let’s add to all this a bad design of public policies, implementation and execution, in particular, the notion of educational “quality” that must be accredited with quantitative or mercantile metrics, without observing that there are subjects behind all this, processes and cultural and social contexts.
In a first approach, it gives the impression that professional and labor development in Chilean Higher Education works only for administrators and the few teachers and researchers who hold a full-time contract. For others, working conditions have been “made more flexible” – according to neoliberal language – with the aim of reducing the budgets of institutions. Although progress has been made in the modernization of HEIs, no special interest has been placed on workers and their working conditions and how this affects the value of training processes and their social and cultural contexts.
In Higher Education Institutions, the work of civil servants is particularly outsourced. Through this, not only the legal binding of the contract is avoided, but also the formation of unions or associations of a union nature, which has an impact on the impossibility of participation in university decisions and progress in the improvement of working conditions. CONATUCH (National Council of Workers of Chilean Universities) has tried to make this public for a long time. “End the precariousness, outsourcing and flexibilization of employment with political decisions that seriously address this demand of Chilean workers,” says CONATUCH in its political proposal, which has been presented in different periods of Government in the MINEDUC. In practice, civil servants (professional, administrative and low-level positions) are usually the most affected by the negative consequences of precarious labor subcontracting: lower wages, inequalities in treatment, labor harassment, unjustified dismissals and alteration of the measurement of work performance, among others.
On the other hand, most higher education teachers in Chile do not have a stable contract but are “fee-based workers” – approximately between 60% and 90% depending on the type of institution. That is, most of the academics who “ticket” for hours of pedagogical classes taught, receive a proportional salary calculated with differentiated fees either by academic degree, discipline or internal categorization. In this way, they do not have basic socio-labor conditions such as unemployment insurance or vacations. The “boletariado” – a neologism that brings together “proletariat” and “ballot” – is made up of these workers who are not recognized as such by the institutions since, from a legal point of view, they are eternally “independent” even if they work decades for the same employer, meet schedules and have fixed tasks assigned. To put an end to all this precariousness, educational institutions must no longer be understood as companies that must maximize their profits at the expense of the working conditions of their workers, whether civil servants or teachers.
Also, the financing of academic research, by its peerIt is administered on the basis of individual competition for state resources (Fondecyt). The Fondecyt promote the excellence of individual work, the constant renewal of ideas (they last between 2 and 4 years) and the productivity of indexed articles. This research grant instrument is not responsible for the working conditions of its researchers and technical staff, nor for the relationship between research and teaching or for the decentralization of knowledge. Its main focus is the production of articles based on international bibliographic metrics. For all this, Fondecyt derives in a policy that produces job insecurity without continuity, health, forecast or vacations. That is, it is a policy that has the side effect of producing poor working conditions.
The training of postgraduate students also presents critical problems: first, because the credits they must access in order to pay for their studies, require the remuneration of the payment with high interest (the CAE is between 2% to 6%) and, second, because the scholarships (either for Nacional or Becas Chile) that are delivered from ANID do not fully cover the needs of the scholarship holders. Moreover, scholarships are not considered “salary” per se, as they are not taxable against the Internal Revenue Service. As there are no “contracts” nor do the subjects be “workers” it excludes them from qualifying to receive social benefits from the State. Moreover, postgraduate students who pay for their studies – which is a significant percentage in Chile – are even more exposed to the ups and downs of the market, since they must study and work at the same time, so the continuity of their studies depends on maintaining their work.
A particular case is the Technical-Vocational Training in Chile. Contractual conditions, from the institutionalized “boleteo” to fixed-term or “contract” contracts, have caused a permanent and institutional crisis in the education system. A few years ago the employment situation of teachers in the Technical-Professional area came to light due to collective lawsuits for unjustified mass dismissals, types of fixed contracts for decades and labor harassment, this forced the criteria of Institutional Accreditation (2021) should be modified. Also the financing to the State Technical Training Centers (CFT) is in crisis with what has led to layoffs due to the closure of the institutions as in the case of the CFT Los Lagos.
The accreditation of higher education institutions also does not consider the working conditions of the different levels, actors and functions as a systemic, organic and basic element. Currently, accreditations look at the number of professors hired, the percentage of them with doctorates and the allocation of state funds (FONDECYT, FONDEF, Rings, Millennia, etc.). However, this view does not extend to the work extent of the establishment with an undaunted blindness, as if the working conditions of civil servants, teaching professors and research could be separated from the quality of education given to students. Moreover, the evaluation criteria for granting accreditation in Technical Training Centers (CFT), Professional Institutes (PI) and university institutions are so dissimilar that they seem to reproduce and perpetuate the inequalities and social segregation of students within the same HEIs. Moreover, the high competition in the “HEI market”, where curricular innovation and the search for “added value” promotes the differentiation between institutions based on their financing (inflow of active capital) and their type (private, State, mixed).
In short, working conditions in Chilean Higher Education are structurally precarious, with stressful duplication of functions and non-existent or diffuse job profiles. The current situation is protected under the perspective of a neoliberal administration, where the university is organized as a company and the capitalization of knowledge is aimed at nurturing “priority areas”, displacing other sciences and disciplines, such as the Arts and Humanities. A national strategy is necessary for the development of policies that think of working conditions in Chilean Higher Education Institutions as a complex system with the various actors, functions, spaces and, at the same time, as a process of training, creation and dissemination of different knowledge throughout personal life, labor, professional and in relation to the different communities. While change should begin with expanding basal economic support to institutions to restore their social and public character, an open and quality dialogue between the universities will also be necessary.sidades, social actors, the organs of the State and the productive sector. Only from a shared diagnosis will it be possible to take the weight of the structural precariousness of working conditions in Chilean Higher Education.

The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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