The salaries of French teachers, called to strike on January 27, are among the lowest in the OECD countries. But revenues are not the only explanation of the sense of decommissioning of the profession.
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While teachers are called to participate on 27 January at an interprofessional day of strike to claim wage upgrades, Pierre Périer, professor of education sciences at Rennes-II University, explains the feeling of Decommissioning that teachers have.
Teachers complain of too low remuneration, for whom some of them are mobilizing, on January 27, to the appeal of trade union organizations. Are there objective measures of the employee decommissioning of teachers?
The easiest way to measure decommissioning is salary, which is itself an indicator of the social position of teachers compared to other professions. In constant euro, it has dropped between 15% and 25% since the beginning of the 2000s. And if teachers have benefited from small upgrades, rather at the beginning of the career, they are not enough to operate a catch-up. The low dynamism of careers, which start at a low level of remuneration and which remain fairly low in the middle of the course, also plays.
The gap also widens with comparable qualification professions. According to the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development], the salaries of French teachers are lower than those of private workers, 21% in the pre-elementary, 23% in the elementary and 12% in college. The high school is less concerned, because of the weight of aggregated teachers, who are better paid.
Finally, the dropout is not only national but international: France is the bad student of the OECD, even if some countries do less well than us.
when we talk about conditions of the Teacher, however, we often repeat that “the salary does not do everything” …
In addition to the objective wage decommissioning, there is also a subjective decommissioning, which is due to the image of the profession and the feeling of recognition by the rest of society. Today, only 7% of teachers, at the College level, believe that their profession is appreciated in society, compared to 27% on average in OECD countries. In a survey of 2,203 high school teachers, we showed that almost all of them estimates to be “little” or “not at all” recognized by policies (92.9%) and public opinion (93.9%). They also have the same feeling vis-à-vis parents and students.
Is this sense of decommissioning also the sign of deeper social transformations?
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