Job Discussion Forums

[Phillippa]

I tried to be good about not using names in this post. I feel people looking into this agency have a right to know my experience with this agency.

I actually just got fired by The Recruiter Who Shall Not Be Named (TRWSNBN) in part because of this forum, since she thought I was one of the people with negative comments. I apologize for the length but this was truly the worst experience I have ever had in three years of teaching for over five companies in three countries. My coworker recently had the opportunity to meet with dozens of people who�d been sent via another recruiting agency to various parts of Thailand, and they concurred this was the worst experience they�d heard of. Part of it was the school I was at Marie Vithaya in Korat, but a lot was TRWSNBN as well.
I should mention I and my coworker are young females. This has a lot to do with the things that happened.

I thought well of TRWSNBN at first�she put me up in her place, trained me, and I thought she was communicative. And maybe it is possible to have a good experience with her if everything is perfect with your school, aside from the fact that like every recruiter, she will milk you of your money at every opportunity (and send you to Laos with an ATM card that doesn�t work outside of Thailand, but that�s another story). I was fine with this, as I wanted a boring place to teach at so I could work on my thesis. My first four months in Korat were uneventful.

The weirdness began when she replaced my coworker�I believe she is one of the commenters, since she was replaced with a week�s notice (the contract specifies you are entitled to six weeks notice), and TRWSNBN asked me to participate in the search for a new teacher and not to tell my coworker that her job was in danger. I told my coworker, of course, because she wouldn�t have had the resources to leave the country otherwise. I figured I was safe because the school liked me, as far as I could tell.

So when TRWSNBN brought the replacement teacher over, my coworker and I met with TRWSNBN as well. I was basically manipulated into re-signing a contract in which I would work during the summer months (April and March), which I was supposed to have off as an unpaid holiday. I had planned to spend the time working and visiting my old students and acquaintances in Cambodia. They also wanted me to sign on for longer than a year or they would find a replacement for me in April.

I had just gotten over a very serious lung infection before the meeting. I had passed out during my illness and struck my face, so when I saw TRWSNBN I had a bruise on my face. I remember thinking, great, this bruise shows everyone how serious my illness was! I was absent for three days. During the meeting with TRWSNBN, my cowowrker, and the replacement teacher, the school made it clear that my absence was unacceptable. I�m familiar with Asian cultures expecting you to work while ill but I thought my case was extreme enough that my absence was justified. Then TRWSNBN took me aside and said basically: �Where did you really get that bruise? I�m fifty, I can read the signs, and I think you�re hiding something.� I was pretty shocked and explained to her that I had a boyfriend in America and that four months was a pretty short time to develop an abusive relationship with someone. She said she believed me. Then she sent me this e-mail:

�And for today, honestly, I didn't believe you that you had the accident in the bathroom because from your symtom it wasn't like that. But it was the trace from bruise that was from fighting or manhandling . Please don't lie me. What happened to you?? If you still respect me and obey me, please tell me the truth. I am nearly fifty now and I have had a lot of experiences in my life. You can't conceal me, M. One more thing, Miss K told me that you very often go outside during lunch. OK, you have the right to do that if you get bored with the food in school. However, you should know or make sense by yourself that it will be dangerous to go outside very often. And it is not good for women to have boy friends there because you can't trust anyone if you don't know the background of his life. Another reason is you can teach well and the school really love about your teaching. However, if your behavior is not good enough, the school can't keep contract with you either.�

As a coworker had been with me when I passed out, I asked her to write TRWSNBN, which she did. And TRWSNBN wrote her back and said she believed me already and there was no need for the e-mail. Meanwhile, I still don�t know if she gossiped about her suspicions to the school, and from things that happened later I think she might never have believed me.

Regardless, these are the things this incident shows about TRWSNBN 1) she is extremely meddlesome and nosy 2) she regards a teacher�s personal life as her business 3) when confronted with the possibility of an abused woman, she will not offer aid or comfort, but hint that her job is in danger. I was pretty freaked out by all this, but figured it was a strange and hopefully uncharacteristic incident, since I really didn�t feel like moving.

The replacement teacher was, like me, a young woman, and we spent a lot of time together. Let�s call her Grace. She was fresh out of college and this was her first experience teaching in a foreign country. So one Friday a month and a half after she�d been teaching, she was pulled aside with another young female teacher by Miss K, the head of the foreign teachers. Grace and the other teacher were EP teachers, while I was a Mathayom teacher, which is probably why I wasn�t in this meeting. The other teacher, a Christian South African was told her skirts were too long and to wear short sleeved shirts. Basically she was too covered up for work. And then Miss K turned to Grace and said some teachers had seen her at the mall with me wearing sleeveless shirts, and that she was thinking of firing the both of us. Grace called me to tell me about this meeting.

Obviously this was very upsetting. We had never been told there was a dress code outside of school. We knew other female teachers in Korat and this had never been an issue for them. And we saw plenty of people outside of school in sleeveless shirts�not just young girls but mothers and older women. We were told it was part of Thai culture. Ah, Thai culture! The constant refrain of the Kafkaesque nightmare that followed. For the record I was never outside in a sleeveless shirt after that.

TRWSNBN was supposed to come the following day to negotiate a new contract for me. Instead, she told me she was going to a school board meeting over some serious business she wouldn�t disclose. I called her and asked about the clothing-outside-of-school issue, but she said there was a more serious issue, one that she refused to elaborate on but that she told us not to worry about.

So Grace and I met her the next day. Here�s what the school board meeting was about: apparently some parents and teachers had seen us outside of school behaving indecently with two foreign men while wearing tiny dresses�basically practically fornicating with them in public. This accusation was made by a Miss T, who was very disliked by the foreign teachers in EP. Also the EP Thai teachers are known for disliking foreign teachers. This accusation was entirely untrue. Every foreign man in this city is old and/or fat and has a decades-younger Thai girlfriend or wife. Not prime boyfriend material. We�re not friendly with many foreign men, mainly Thai girls and Filipinos. My coworker and I quickly figured out that these parents had only spoken to Miss T, no one else. I�m pretty sure if anyone had bothered to investigate the claims of these �parents� they would have discovered them to be fictitious. Also, despite the fact that I was apparently wearing a backless dress, no one knew I had a tattoo on my back�exactly why I never wear shirts cut low in the back in Asia.

First we spoke with Miss K. We didn�t spend our time defending ourselves at this point because we were trying to figure out what exactly the accusation was. Were the men foreign? We had hung out with Filipino men and Thai men, but never foreigners. What exactly were we wearing? Where did these parents see us? It was during this conversation that we figured out people were lying. We demanded to face our accuser. Miss K went to get her, and we spoke with TRWSNBN.

At this point I should bring up that something similar had happened with the female co-teacher who wore too much clothing (it seems there�s no way to dress correctly at our school). She had been tutoring a Mathayom 3 student and a teacher had spread a rumor that she was sleeping with him. She went through a month of worrying and realizing every Thai teacher was convinced this happened, until she talked to the sisters and the student was interviewed and stated nothing had happened. I brought this up to TRWSNBN, and she said she thought the teacher was jealous of us and had made up the rumor. She told me to speak up and defend myself when Miss T spoke.

It turned out to be bad advice. Miss T came and spoke in Thai for half an hour. No one would translate what she was saying. After half an hour I asked for someone to tell us what she was saying (so I could defend myself). I was told by Miss K to be quiet as I was being disrespectful. TRWSNBN didn�t defend me and she didn�t tell me how I was to defend myself if I wasn�t allowed to speak up. I tried to let Miss T finish, but she went on for another fifteen minutes. I�m not kidding. Forty-five minutes of listening to someone accuse you of SOMETHING, which you know is bad (because she�s literally pointing at us, yelling, and rolling her eyes like she�s about to have an epileptic seizure), but which you don�t know the specifics of. I was completely stressed at this point, Grace was crying, so I interrupted again to ask someone to please tell me what Miss T was saying. In response, Miss T got up in a huff and accused us of not being respectful. Miss K yelled at me (yes, yelled, raised voice and everything) for not being respectful to Miss T. We tried to defend ourselves to her, and in talking about the fact that no one had told us anything about how to dress outside of school, it slipped that Grace had told me about the clothing meeting the previous day. Miss K absolutely flipped her s%&@ at this point��You talked to her about that?!� she yelled incredulously, and Grace was like, yeah, you mentioned her by name and the issue affected her, so it seemed sensible. Then Miss K left.

So we�re left with TRWSNBN, and we�re obviously upset despite the fact that we�re trying to control ourselves. I�m pretty sure this is why she refused to tell us what was going on, so she could see our real emotions and do what was best for her. And what was best for her was to move us to another school in two weeks. This was not good for either of us. We didn�t want to make any kind of a decision this quickly. We wanted to figure out if this was just a rumor that could be put down or if there were going to be real problems. But the main problem, and the reason we both wanted to attempt to stay at the school in the first place, was that if we did what TRWSNBN wanted we wouldn�t be paid in March and April, and neither of us had the resources to even last for those two months, much less do any traveling (the reason people come to this country in the first place). This happened a week before March. I had been paying off bills in America and had figured I could put off saving until March and April and had made some big purchases (a rice cooker and a hairdryer�ooh, I�m living dangerously!). Grace had only been at the school for a month. So we both tried to convince TRWSNBN to work it out with the school at let us stay for March and April.

TRWSNBN tried hard to talk us into going with her plan, but we insisted. She said the best thing to do was to apologize to Miss K and Ms Thom and never mention the subject again and dress properly outside of school. Seriously. Apologize to this crazy teacher who lied about us and to Miss K who clearly believed her. Grace and I decided later that this would be tantamount to admitting the rumor was true. We went to Miss K to apologize for �being disrespectful� but to insist again the story wasn�t true. She told us she had nothing to say to us and didn�t accept our apology.

We agreed that TRWSNBN had not represented us well at all. She had 1) completely blindsided us, instead of preparing us for what was to come, even after we repeatedly asked her to tell us about the school board meeting. Shady, to say the least, right? 2) The standing up for ourselves advice had been bad, 3) the apology advice had been bad and 4) she had not defended us at all that we could see. Also, when we asked what Ms. Thom had been saying for 45 minutes she would only say she was being too serious about the clothes. It felt like everyone around us was lying and we didn�t know who to trust. And then we remembered the fictitious abusive boyfriend event. So it didn�t seem like doing what she said, i.e. letting the whole thing go, would be in our best interests. TRWSNBN�s maybe, but there was no guarantee of our working at Marie Vithaya if people believed this rumor.

So we talked to a senior member of the foreign staff who�d been there awhile and knew Thai culture better than we. He suggested we talk to the sisters of the school. They were ultimately in charge of who was fired, not Miss K. And the incident with the overdressed teacher had been resolved when she talked to the sisters about it. So we approached the sisters, but they were unavailable to speak. Then, on Monday, the s%&@ absolutely hit the fan. Miss K pulled Grace out of her class and yelled at her for a half an hour for talking to the sisters. Then TRWSNBN called me and screamed at me until I basically had a nervous breakdown in the middle of my office. Probably because she�d never screamed at me before, and she was yelling as if I�d done something wrong, rather than defend myself and my job against some vicious lying person.

I got the following e-mail from TRWSNBN:

�Sometimes I get bored with you that I have to tell you every thing which is you should make sense by yourself. That's why I said you were so stubborn. No one will listen to you.

This is Thailand, you cannot change anything here. It is like if I go to your country , I have to follow the rules in your country too. If you are in Roman, please do as the Romans do. I think you ever heard this proverb. I am so tired to explain you so much and you talk too much about the money and other things. You said you are not rich and don't have much money, but you can go to the club, dance and drink. You don't save your money for the future. What does it mean? I think you are quite difficult to understand some situation and sometimes you think of only your side , I am so sorry to speak straight away that you are so self-centred. This is Thailand, if you are trying to do anything that it is not Thai culture, I sware noone believe or listen to you. You should adapt and adopt yourself to servive here because this is Thailand again.�

As you can see, at this point she�s believing the story too and convinced I�m some good time girl going out partying all the time.

So at this point I just ate it up. I knew I couldn�t make it without a job for the next two months, I knew TRWSNBN was probably not even going to bother to relocate me. So I wai-ed and apologized my ass off to everyone and told them I�d do whatever they wanted if they�d let me work. So I worked. I worked until March 12th. Then I received this e-mail:
�I am still in Australia. Anyway, I think I have had a lot of problems in your case and Grace*'s so long. I feel so bored with them. I already gave both of you a chance and my assistant talked to both of you a lot too. We have also tried to negociate with the school for long in order to solve the problems about you two.

I don't think I can deal with these kinds of problems anymore. Therefore,I have made the decision not to employ you any longer. Please stop any negociation with me. That's enough for the school to look down upon the company because of both of you. I feel so sad becasue right now there aren't any problems from other clients of mine except this school. I don't want to talk about it again. � (name changed)

Two day�s notice. And, yeah, this situation has been seriously s%&@ty for me. I don�t have parents who can bail me out in a situation like this. TRWSNBN knows that. But it�s almost worse in Grace�s case�imagine this is your first experience of Thailand, of working overseas. She�d been here for NOT EVEN two months.

And the whipped cream topping on the cake? We weren�t even paid for the time we worked. Marie Vithaya paid TRWSNBN. But she never paid us.

So yeah, I wouldn�t work with her or with SINE, I�ll never work in Thailand again, EVER. I�ve seen all over these boards the message that Thailand is a great place to visit but a pretty crappy place to work. I�m finally out of this country after calling in about ten favors. And maybe I�ll visit sometime just to get the bad taste from this experience out of my mouth, but I�ve got to agree with the sentiment. If you must work in Thailand, go there in person, don�t go through a recruiter, get a feel for the school and talk to the foreign staff. If you�re a female and there aren�t girls on staff, run, because they think they can treat girls worse than guys. If you need a job set up before you go to the country, work in Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea, and visit Thailand on vacation�you�ll have the money to do so, whereas here you won�t be able to afford much traveling within it. Because you�re not likely to luck out signing up blind with a recruiter on the internet. Good experiences sound like this: �oh, sure, I only get paid for nine months, but I don�t have to work the other three, and they don�t pay my Visa expenses, but they did give me 4,000 baht to go to Laos over the weekend, and sure they take tax money out every month even though I should be paying it to the Thai government directly, but hey, at least they�re only skimming some money off the top of my monthly paycheck instead of withholding it entirely! �

[Gypsy King]

SES is just what it is....your typical Thai ESL recruitment mafia. I would recommend staying as far away from them as possible. They only are concerned with making their schools happy at the expense of teachers. TIT!

[MaiPenRai]

First of all, sorry you had a bad experience. Schools with religious affiliations are known for being very difficuly to work for in foreign countries. Throw in the old Thai kulchur "excuse" into the mix and its a recipe for disaster.

Sounds like an absolutely horrible school. I worked at a school a few years back that had a couple of nasty old hens who had nothing better to do than cause troubles for the foreign teachers. These same Thai teachers never prepped/planned for classes, were constantly 15-30 minutes late for classes, pathetic teachers, etc. etc. Its just jealousy in most cases and in almost all cases its older female Thai teachers (based on plenty of experience dealing with Thai schools). Usually they know they are crap teachers and when a foreigner comes along who can do the job better (get paid more and is often more popular with the students), they (Thai teacher) have to defend thier territory before everyone realizes that they (Thai teacher) have been doing a crap job for the past 20 years. LOL, brings back some funny memories.

It sounds like a case of the school and teachers not really wanting foreigners there, but having to hire them to get parents interested (and pay lots of money) in their EP program. Schools like this often negotiate a kick back for those in power positions (coming right out of the parents' pockets) when dealing with a recruiting agency.

While there are 2 sides to every story, it sounds like Sine Education Service is a company that should NOT be touched with a ten foot pole. If those are actual emails, this woman is being extremely hypocritical spouting off about "Thai kulchur" and those emails would never be sent to a Thai person and the entire incident would have been handled differently had it been a Thai teacher. Regardless of the situation, you should get paid for time worked. ANY agency who doesn't pay for ANY reason should be avoided at all costs.

To anyone thinking about coming to Thailand, let this be a lesson. PLEASE make sure that you are have enough money to last for 2-3 months AND an emergency fund and/or a return flight home. Females should also note that many Thais still treat females as second class citizens, especially in the more rural areas of Thailand and/or the NE.

Had these teachers had any money, they could have walked away from this crappy situation as soon as it started looking ugly and saved a lot of heartache and stress.

Not all recruitment agencies behave like this though. Please post your story wherever possible on the net to warn others of this woman and SES.

P.S. I have foreign aquaintances in Korat who aren't fat or dating teenage Thai girls.

[Sutherland]

"P.S. I have foreign aquaintances in Korat who aren't fat or dating teenage Thai girls."

Sorry, man, bitterness was making me stereotype hardcore. It was just that it was a subject between my friend and I that it would be impossible for a white girl to date there-- I had a boyfriend, but she didn't. She wasn't too into Asian guys, and every white guy there had a Thai girlfriend. And there are so many old, not too attractive white guys with hot young Thai girlfriends in a place like Korat that it is difficult not to sterotype. Anyways, I put that in there to underline the ridiculousness of the accusation that we were whoring it up with two foreign guys. Thai guys would have been much more likely to be whored up by us if we had been whores in the first place.

[Phillippa]

Just keeping it relevant-- beware, she is posting on ajarn also.