Globalization and its educational discontents: neoliberalization and its impacts on Education Workers’ rights, pay, and conditions.

Based on work being conducted by the author for the International Labour Organisation, and on a major series of four books the author is editing – Globalisation/ Neoliberalism/ Education and Resistance, which draws data from thirty different countries, this paper analyses some the consequences that the neoliberalisation of schooling holds for teaching and learning in these turbulent times. The first section of the paper examines the relationship between education and Capital and how neoliberal policies have exaccerbated this relationship's tendencies to: 1. generate increasing inequalities within and between countries, and 2. diminish democratic local and national control over education The second section examines the impacts of neoliberalisation on education workers' securities – their pay/ salaries, conditions of employment, stresses and pressures at work, and their work identity and status. It also examines the impacts on the rights and powers of education trade unions, leading to the author's conclusion that the "the commodification of humanity" effected under neoliberal policies are forcing a reconceptualisation of the very concept of democracy that demands a vital public response in resistance to the global neoliberal capitalist agenda in schooling and education.