THE SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEM IN THE GRIP OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS AND COST: AN ASSESSMENT ON TURKISH EDUCATION SECTOR

Abstract

As in many countries, there is a pressure on social security system of Turkey to reduce overall costs and increase savings at the same time. While the private sector responds these pressures by increasing flexible and atypical working types as expected, surprisingly, the public sector increasingly applies similar strategies. In this context, the education sector is exposed to various employment reforms and regulations. In this sense, more unsecured practices such as paid teaching and fixed-term contracts are replacing indefinite term job contracts both in private and public sectors. The negative side of this process is the unequal dual structure where a group of teachers are employed under indefinite term job contracts with stable social security coverage and where even a larger group of teachers are employed with fixed-term job contracts and covered only within their teaching period. These teachers, who are excluded from formal right-based social security system, inevitably, replace traditional and informal social protection networks instead. Consequently, the education sector in Turkey has become one of the most vulnerable sectors, where people intensely use their informal networks to overcome the social protection crisis they face. Therefore, social security has lost its core feature of being a universal human right in Turkish education sector as confirmed by the qualitative research of this study. The findings portray that governments in Turkey are breaking away from rights-based social protection policies at least in education sector, and informal protection mechanisms such as familial solidarity and/or charity are getting stronger. In other words, charity-based social protection strategy has become the most common way to get access to social protection and to overcome the cost pressures in the social security system.

Keywords: The Social Security System, Universal Human Rights, Cost, Turkish Education Sector

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