Fuddland

Having received my last full-time pay-cheque from my former company, the full cost of leaving their employment early has been revealed: equivalent to two months’ worth of rent, plus a passed-on fee for terminating the contract with the internet service provider. This financial loss, whilst pretty annoying, is still worth it to be free of a manager that has demonstrated that she will use emotional blackmail and twisting of the truth in order to try to squeeze as much out of her employees, not to mention her customers, as she possibly can.

Allow me to document some of the occurrences and my experiences involving my ex-manager during the six months that I worked there, so that anyone thinking of working there who comes across this entry will be aware of what I saw. [Please note the date and time of this entry; there may be new management by the time you are reading this.]

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Non-payment of staff

Within my first two weeks, a teacher with wide experience and knowledge of the Chinese language and culture got into stand-up argument with a student she was teaching on a one-to-one basis. This student, a high-level employee of a well-known German company, was quite blunt with his opinions and I understand why the teacher was offended by some of the things the student had been saying, although I don’t condone her challenging him directly, let alone arguing so vocally.

The teacher was summarily sacked — a bit extreme if you ask me, but again, not entirely unsurprising. What is surprising is that, to this day, she has not been paid for the work she had done for the company up to the day she was fired. Not a penny, cent nor jiao. It is not a case of a contractual get-out clause, because no contract existed beyond a verbal agreement to begin work and sort out the details later. My ex-manager refuses to respond to any of her emails. On one occasion the teacher came back to the company to request the money she is owed. my ex-manager refused to discuss the matter, and at one point attempted to get the teacher to leave by declaring,

Please get out of my office, I want to go to the toilet!

Pathetic, eh? When this didn’t work [the teacher simply waited until she came back from the toilet], my ex-manager called her husband, who called the police, who escorted the teacher off the premises. At the station, thanks to the teacher explaining the situation in her fluent Chinese, the police were sympathetic, but couldn’t help her claim her pay because my ex-manager had not processed the paperwork for her to be officially working there. Her hands were, and remain, tied.

What’s more, she is not the only one who has been let go without pay: at least two other employees have been fired during my time working there, because their work was not up to scratch, and remain unpaid. There is nothing contractual that says they would not be paid for work done, nor is there [in my opinion] a moral right to withhold pay, but my ex-manager maintains there were “verbal” agreements that this could be the case. I can say that I myself never had such a verbal agreement, and that I strongly doubt the management’s word on this matter.

My ex-manager found out I had discussed some of these events with other employees, and gave me a talking-to for “gossiping”, and that I “don’t know the whole story”. This may be true, but I know what I saw and I know whose word I trust more. The experience left me with a sincere dread that, every month, my salary would be docked a certain amount for some reason — in truth, this never happened, although I was denied performance-related bonuses for what I saw as bogus reasons, and I never shook the feeling that my ex-manager would have no qualms docking or denying my salary at a whim.

Real life can’t get in the way

It seemed to be almost out of the question for me to ask for classes to be cancelled due to illness or personal emergencies: my one [and only] request to delay a class was denied, and a part-time teacher who needed to move house at short notice, and thoughtfully told the school that she might need to cancel one class, was told in reply that her services were no longer required. In fairness, in recent months teachers have successfully cancelled or rescheduled classes due to illness, so perhaps I asked at a particularly awkward time or I was teaching a delicant client.

Irregular working hours

The working hours centre were, whilst comparable with other language schools, ill-defined. New courses can be assigned with short notice and begin at any hour of the day from 8:00am to 9:00pm, any day of the week, preventing one from committing to other activites such as Chinese classes, martial arts training, or from going on short trips out of Sūzhōu (苏州). Other schools appear to offer much clearer scheduling, allowing one to plan in advance, but I wouldn’t be surprised if all of them scheduled unsociable hours at one time or another if the client’s money was good enough.

Deception

My ex-manager has been known to lie to, or at least deceive, her customers about the level of experience of the company’s teachers, in order to secure their contract. For example, when I was assigned to take over from the aforementioned sacked teacher, the German company was told I had several years of English teaching experience in China — the true figure was less than four months.

The company website contains a list of employees with a brief autobiographical statement. This list displays many teachers who no longer work for the company, and have not done for many months. You might think this disparity is simply due to slow updates to the website, but it has been updated at least once since I joined, and teachers who had already left before I arrived were intentionally kept on the site, because their experience, skills or qualifications made the school more attractive to potential clients.

For a student who did not show an increased score in his final listening test compared to the result on the same test at the beginning of the course, I was told to fabricate the end-of-course report and give him a slightly-increased final mark.

If you are considering teaching for a private company in China, I would strongly advise that you negotiate your contract to explicitly include sufficient free time to pursue any other activities you might like to do, and if there is even the slightest glimmer of a chance that you won’t be able to see through the entire duration of your contract, then consider whether you’re willing to take the financial hit, or do as some other teachers have done in the past and simply disappear — if you try and go by the book and even, like I have, offer to stick around longer to finish off courses, it doesn’t count for anything.

#1

Anglofille | 2007 / 01 / 15 – 08:53

These working conditions remind me of my former employer, Harvard University, located in glorious Cambridge, Massachusetts (which is, funnily enough, referred to as “The People’s Republic of Cambridge” by the locals).

I guess I exaggerate a bit about the evilness of Harvard (but just a bit). At least at Harvard, we had unions to protect us. I doubt there are unions for foreign English teachers in China, though it appears that they are desperately needed.

I hope your next place of employment is better. And I hope it’ll be okay that you published this.

#2

David | 2007 / 01 / 15 – 11:25

Re #1: Yeah, I know it’s a little foolhardy publishing the name of the company, but I wanted Google to direct anyone searching for information about working there to read about my experiences.

#3

Daisy | 2007 / 01 / 19 – 18:54

Good for you, David. If it helps just one person avoid similar treatment it’ll be worth it. Hope you’re enjoying your well-deserved holiday!

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