Network of Opportunity or Network of Inequality?

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the education sector has seen Southeast Asian educational institutions’ active subscription to neoliberal policies. Said practice has inadvertently resulted in schools’, colleges’, and universities’ privatization and marketization efforts at a scale that was never seen before. Such practices, however, have resulted in social inequities that have changed the protocols for the hiring and employment of foreign teachers particularly those in the field of English language education, adversely affecting foreign teachers who are deemed less “desirable” in the labor market. Having taken shape in the form of privileging and essentializing and materialized through pay gaps and other management protocols, educational institutions inadvertently allow social inequities to happen by using racialized language in online job advertisements, thus impeding employment for certain races while accelerating it for the favored groups. However, as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has created an impact on international travels, virtually halting the hiring and employment of foreign teachers, it is crucial to determine whether this practice remains the same. This chapter made a quantitative-qualitative comparative analysis of 176 pre-COVID and during-pandemic online job ad texts taken from 16 online job sites. It looked into the Thai teaching job market context by using documentary research methodology (DRM) and Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA). By examining a structuralist approach, this study found out that the online job ad texts for foreign teachers in Thailand advertised at the time of the pandemic continue to form part of structural discrimination, a mechanism that unevenly distributes work opportunities, thereby resulting in a racialized and discriminatory hiring and employment protocols that happen within the interiority of what should supposedly be a network of opportunity. What this study ultimately offers is both the knowledge and understanding of how neoliberalism and its appeal to relevant stakeholders continue to persist notwithstanding a major global crisis. That in the face of people’s need for jobs brought about by the adversity that the pandemic has caused, a market-driven employment protocol continues to dominate it, disregarding issues that trample on equity and justice.