Job Discussion Forums

[Burl Ives]

Were I singling you out, it'd be "numbnut". And anyway, I'm trying to up my visible testiness quotient. It's a general profile thing and "numbnuts" is in the program. Personally, I'm sure your nut has plenty of feeling. Buddies?

[batman]

i just have to add to this conversation, that aot of you are under the inpression that we get paid more than the local teachers. well, we get more cash, sure, but most of them get an apt out of the deal. and i dont just mean a place to live while they work there. part of the deal for most local school employees, is that the school will buy them an apt. if they stay at the same school long enough, they will own this apt, and can do as they wish with it. sometimes, they are offered apt's for very cheap prices as well. most are told not to discuss this with the foreigners, as suddenly it looks like we are not getting as good a deal as it appears. one guy i worked with got his apt for 30,000 yuan, while the real market value for such an apt would have been 300,000-400,000 yuan. this is why they accept such low pay. so would i, thats a heck of a bonus.

[chegs]

I'm not trying to provoke anyone. As a DOS here, I see it as my primary function to protect my teachers from the excesses of the market. I know that FT's here can be abused. For example, one school in Fuzhou cut off the telephone and electricity of two teachers who refused to work free overtime. I know all that stuff.

BUT, when a school doesn't force overtime on you, refunds your visa costs and full return airfare on arrival, buys you welcome packages, buys you a DVD player for your home (Any employer ever do that for any of you back home?) and puts you in a position of authority and trust, to then stab your employer in the back for no other reason than merely wanting to? (References were checked, by the way and all stood up.)

Believe it or not, you cynics, some of us still believe in open and free communication at every level. Had the individual in question told me he wasn't happy, it would have been no problem for us to part on good terms. Maybe I'm an old hippy, I don't really care. But at least I'm an old hippy with a sense of right and wrong and when I'm wronged, why shouldn't I have my gripe, just as wronged teachers have this platform to vent their spleen?

[struelle]

[Wolf]

Should teachers be allowed to blacklist schools? Oh, for certian. Imagine how much pain and suffering has been avoided because of sites like this, imperfect as they are.

Should schools be allowed to blacklist teachers? Meh. In most countries they have a right to associate as they please. Any DoS or school owner should know enough about teachers to hire good ones and skip bad ones. If they don't, well they'll learn the hard way. Bad teachers are probably not going to get work in the best of schools. It would be nice, in a way, for schools to take such an interest in the quality of teachers, but it's a moot point. I don't see the EFL industry being regulated with national, or even provincial, unity anytime soon.

Do I earn more than a local? Well, that's a bit subjective.

If I never left China, ever, then the answer is an unqualified yes, don't be ridiculous.

But ... I have expenses in the first world. My grad school is in England. The exchange rate is something like 15 kuai to the pound. When you divide my salary by 15, it just ain't all that impressive.

If I wanted to move back to Canada and re-start my life, then my savings automatically get divided by about 5 or 6. My money gets reduced to less than 20% of its current value, just by going home.

I'd say that it's inevitable that most of the EFL teachers in China will repatriate or go somewhere else before they die of old age, and that kind of takes the wind out of our financial sails.

Do I have more earning power in my country of origion than most locals do in theirs? The answer is no. And I'm not the only 5000-or-less-laowai out there.

[Burl Ives]

A friend of mine was getting the skinny on a school for me today, FAO email addresses and such. Apparently the director said directly that if the foreigner had too much China experience, they didn't want him. Put that in your high salary and smoke it.

[Roger]

OK, Nik_knack, you made a point by saying at your school you make significantly more than your Chinese colleagues. I can't disprove you, nor would I try. I also made more in a public kindergarten than my Chinese colleagues, plus they worked a lot more there than I did.
Still, I maintain my claim.

I maintain it because government policy is actively biased in favour of their own teachers. Nothing wrong with this, to my way of thinking. If it appears to be contradicted by realities dictated by market forces then these are those famous exceptions to the rule.

I worked in a provincial college and quit because of poor pay (among many reasons). My pay was: 8000 a month, at least that was the PROMISE; the reality, however, was they only paid me per hour actually spent in the classroom. Then, they lowered my contact time due to poor planning - having forgotten that their students had to take part in training elsewhere. This ate into my wages. My salary plummeted to 3000 for one month, which had one week of holidays, unpaid, of course...
The FAO was a young woman freshly graduated from a Xi'an university, and she made 3000 every month, come wind or sunshine, holidays or work. How do you feel when your pay fluctuates between 3000 and 8000, while your Chinese colleague has a regular income which is significantly higher than the average pay of white-collar workers in her native Xi'an, even in a coastal town such as Shantou or Fuzhou?

In my first college, I earned 1300 - which, after adjusting for esxchange rates valid at that time! - amounted to RMB 2500. My workload was 13 periods a week. Other foreign teachers had to put in 16 periods a week, doing conversation classes (not me). Chinese teachers were free to decide to work a minimum of 8 (eight!) houirs a week, and many actually did! Of course, their pay was lower than mine, but it was still sufficiently high. What's more, they all moonlighted, so they were able to more than double their income. Why they refused to work more time on campus rather than working outside is a mystery I can't answer, but it's common.
Also, that college invited all Chinese teachers who had been there for the last 4 years (but not senior teachers with more than 5 years of experience) for an all-expenses-paid holiday to THAILAND in the summer holidays. Foreign teachers were not even paid summer holiday salary!

I can give you a somewhat satisfactory answer as to why schools elect to pay less to their Chinese teachers: there is a glut now, oversupply of freshly-graduated Chinese English teachers. In the old days - 5 to 10 years ago - most graduates from normal schools would SHUN teaching as a career, opting for the far more lucrative private business sector. Many of my erstwhile students ended up working in trading companies. English market values are best recognised by businesspeople, not by the state.

[jg]

Chinese teachers - apart from the star professors, who get paid like stars do in any field - don't come close to us in terms of salary. If they do, its because of those who show up to be "culturally enriched" and are willing to make 3500 or so a month and work nearly fulltime. Especially in the big cities! The rise in salary for Chinese teachers in Big Smokes I and II doesn't come near the rise for FTs.

Okay, some FT professors make little, but how many hours do they teach? And they certainly don't have to pay for housing!

The Shanghai Public Schools have been looking to fill a kindy teacher shortage, and the starting wage is 3000. One of my colleagues previously taught in Jinan, admittedly not a mover and shaker city but the captial of Shandong province nonetheless - 2500 a month. My former Chinese teacher is a university professor in Shandong teacher's University - at 6000 per month, I was making more than her for a few more hours each month. My Chinese colleagues make between 1200 - 1800 a month to teach English. There is a reason why there are is so much salary envy/resentment in China between the FT's and the locals.

One last example: a Chinese guy I met in Beijing with a master's degree in Big Brain Math from Johns Hopkins University (one of the tops in the US) teaching at what he admitted was a 2nd tier university there - still, the first tier prime positions are rare, he said - and he was making 3000? 3500? a month. I forget which... here is an overseas educated man, sharp as a razor, and getting squat. The rule much more than the exception.

The figures of 10,000 RMB monthly for the vast majority of Chinese teachers (again, outside of the star professors) are ridiculous... even given the famous "red packets", few teachers average out that much. If they could rake it in like that, then why don't professionals in other areas? I think people are seeing a lot of new money in the big cities (much of it from Guanxi laden jobs, not the teaching field) and not realizing how much many are doing without.

I am about to start a teacher training program for English teachers in the Shanghai schools... I will be keen to how much these teachers expect to bring home. Time and again have I heard from Shanghainese that they would like to be a teacher, but the money just isn't there...

[tony lee]

This little insult illustrates a major problem I see with any black list or even job journals such as the one elsewhere on this site -- and that is the ability to sign on with a fake name and make any accusation you like from anywhere in the world, secure in the knowledge that unless someone can identify you from information in other posts, you are completely untouchable.

I think a site where both schools and teachers could post information would be a great idea provided there were some basic safeguards in place -- such as allowing both sides to put their case in the same file. Naturally, all parties would have to be identified. The schools are fairly easy, although there are the ones ones who change names and sites, but I guess the only way to properly identify foreigners would be to publish their passport details and a photo. After all, unless the data is searchable it is useless.

Someone mentioned red flags being waved by gaps in resumes -- but realistically how can Chinese schools check any information in a resume. Even fake degrees would not show up unless the school made an application to the issuing university. Since they probably charge a search fee and take their own sweet time, qualifications and references are almost never checked. The whole Chinese recruitment system relies almost 100% on blind trust -- on both sides.

The only way that will change is if the Chinese government introduces some sort of endorsement system for teachers. I could see that this would cost maybe several hundred dollars and take anything up to a year to be issued with your work ticket. That is fair I guess and would be roughly equivalent to the hassles schools in China go through to get their approvals to employ foreign teachers. In the west you can't even drive a school bus let alone teach unless you have been through a vetting process, and I know that in Australia at least, the accreditation procedures for language schools is now very strict to try and weed out the cowboys. Part of the accreditation involves the qualifications and experience of the administration and the senior teaching staff.

Perhaps we could end up with a two-tier system. The top one of approved schools employing approved teachers and the lower tier where everything goes.

Why not?

Tony Lee

[Burl Ives]

[tony lee]

I said --
"a major problem I see with any black list or even job journals such as the one elsewhere on this site -- and that is the ability to sign on with a fake name and make any accusation you like from anywhere in the world, "

Regardless of your own particular set of ethics, unless this problem of transparency and accountability on both sides are addressed, then the present system will remain flawed. Whether the school side is also badly flawed (via a useless dispute resolution procedure) is irrelevant.

I'm not an apologist for the schools -- far from it. Zhang Fenghai, the previous FAO at Dalian Institute of Light Industry was quite unapologetic in using the ineffectiveness of the conciliation procedure to rip me off for quite a bit of money -- and I am dealing with that on several different fronts, all of which involve me using my own name.


Resumes and references are often worth less than the paper they are written on, and having been on both sides of the interview table I know that only very rarely does an interviewer take the slightest bit of notice of references, and only marginally more notice of the details of the average resume.

I suggested that the only way that will change is if the Chinese government introduces some sort of endorsement system for teachers. This will cost money and cause long delays, but like it or not, this is the way the industry is heading

[Roger]

I think, there are an unquantifiable number of minor problems that we should not allow our employers to hold against us, such as perceived "unprofessionalism" (not that I do not see a problem in unprofessional teachers myself, but our employers are least interested in that!); however, there are some major problems that we should lend employers a helping hand in warding off:
- Teachers with a past of violent behaviour: this can be recorded and
verified and testified about by independent others (say, a teacher slaps
fellow teachers or students - he must be made to sign a letter warning
him with dismissing in case of recurrence...);
- drunks that repeatedly disturb the peace on school premises: if this
is a recurrent problem, then get the PSB involved and keep a police
record. That's easy to do, and the police would not have to take
immediate action. Sad, but I feel I must make this suggestion.
- Sexual predators and deviants: Again, involve the PSB!

There might be other problematic behavioral patterns; in any case, an independent official side should be involved so employer accusations can be corroborated. In those cases, they should be allowed to post their notes on a public website such as eslcafe!
My view, anyway!

[arioch36]

[Burl Ives]

[Burl Ives]

On salaries, I checked again. An "uncle" of a "friend" is the "general manager" of a province level branch of a State-Owned Company. His "salary" is less than 2000 a month. Yep, SOE General Managers make less salary than you do.

In the Did You Know? file: schools take a slug out of basic salary for teachers. It might be 300 out of the, maybe, 800 a month. When the teacher wants to buy a house the school pays out 600 for every 300 it took. If the teacher wants to leave, they get the 600s as a lump sum. Social Welfare, it's called.

Everyone needs to know, the salary you make, all things considered, adds up to about the same as what is spent on the average, and I emphasize "average", teacher.

How stupid do you think Chinese are?