Job Discussion Forums

[Never Ceased To Be Amazed]

[johnslat]

Mr. Carpenter strikes me as being a gentleman of exceptional integrity, honesty, and courage.

All of which can get one into a heap of trouble; hence the origin of the expression "Discretion is the better part of valor." (of course, since it was Falstaff who was given this line - he speaks it after feigning death on the battlefield - one needs to take it with a few grains of salt.)

Nevertheless, I admire his stand. As long as he can accept the admittedly unjust and unfair consequences of his virtues, well, more power to him.

Regards,
John

[Bebsi]

[isabel]

[scot47]

But he could have timed his postings better. What has been gained by him posting before leaving KSA ?

Discretion is the better part of valour.

[isabel]

[Never Ceased To Be Amazed]

@ scot and Isabel...which is why I opined, "There comes a point..."

Been 'dere, but NOT dun dat! I likes ta walk off with my winnings!

NCTBA

[isabel]

[Mia Xanthi]

[John Carpenter]

I spent Thursday with a man who had read my article and travelled a long distance to give me a lot of good advice. He was in my villa for about 5 hours with his copy of the labour laws, and showed me a great many ways that I have wronged, such as my dismissal should have been bi-lingual, as should my contract, and that the only person who can fire me is the person who signed my contract. He also gave me a ton of email addresses and fax numbers that I can use to advertise and promote what has happened to me.
Friday was spent printing and photocopying all kinds of information in support of my claim, and contacting others who want to divulge information about these and similar events. The biggest problem was getting people to translate from English to Arabic but I was fortunate in the end to find two very gallant people out of about 10 asked.
Today 30/10 was spent at the Labour Office. I arrived during prayer time and the place was virtually empty, but filled up very quickly. The staff were very helpful and I even was able to get one more cover sheet translated, and an appointment was set up for next week for the Labour Representative, someone from PMU (I know who it won't be) and me. I am so looking forward to this and I am primed

[Mia Xanthi]

I never knew how absolutely BRAVE you are. You rock! Best of luck with the good fight.

[isabel]

I agree completely with Mia. As another good friend of ours said last night- Jason is the guy you want in your corner in a brawl. You are the most stand up guy I know.

I am following this saga day by day with increasing interest.

Mia is right- you will be smiling on your way out the door with your honesty and integrity, they will be left with the morass they have made for themselves and have to live with. You are beloved by the people you work and have worked with, they are despised.

[Charybdis]

Never in my life have I had such a dreadful experience as I had working 2 years in Saudi Arabia for PMU. As a result of that experience, I would never return to a position in Saudi, and I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind either seeking or accepting an offer to work there. A friend asked me to post an account of just one lousy experience I had at PMU. [There are so many other terrible things that happened in my two years there that I�m writing a book about it, which I pray will be a best seller. I�d like the world to know what a horrible place it is to live and how incredibly nasty and hateful the Saudis are (at least our PMU overlords).]

Here�s my one story, by request. Every month we were required to pay our electric bills for our villas at the university compound. Most electric bills were $30-50, although families that ran their air-con in all rooms might�ve been a bit higher. I arrived in September and the first bill was due in early October. I paid it--about $12. In October I was out of the country for 2 weeks, and, of course, during that time the only thing electric that was running was my frig. I returned in early November, and received a $200 electric bill to pay. I questioned it, and the compound manager, a PMU employee, Salim, said I must pay it. He said he would have the electric company come out and check my villa, which had a sort of substation looking bit of electric equipment in the back. I thought I might be paying for electricity for other units or the common areas. I paid the bill under protest, but I did pay it. Salim did not give me a receipt, however (he gave no one receipts; we all paid in cash).
The next month I was told by the university that I hadn�t paid my October electric bill, $200, and so they had deducted it from my salary. Turns out that Salim, who had been fired because he was suspected of being behind many thefts in the compound and also was accused of pedophilia, had never turned in my payment for the October electric bill. Now please remember: Salim was PMU�s employee, and PMU fired him for cause (theft among other things). When I protested, I was supported by the Director of the Women�s Campus, who knew I had paid it the first time, and also by certain others in administration. But my appeal was denied because I didn�t have a receipt (not that anyone had ever been given one by the PMU manager).

By the way, because I was a woman I was never permitted to talk to any male in administration directly about my situation. A man from accounting (let's call him Rami) stood me up for a pre-scheduled appointment in the Director of the Women�s Campus�s office to discuss the matter--she and I waited more than 45 minutes for him. When we called him to find out why he wasn�t there, he said, literally, that he had �more important things to do� than to come over to the women�s campus and meet about something so trivial.

But amazing the story doesn�t end here. The next month PMU deducted another $200 from my paycheck, for a total of more than $600! No explanation, no right to appeal. By the way, my November electric bill was $32, and I was there the whole month. So imagine what a 2-week bill from October should have been. I never ever had more than a $50 bill after that. I believe that the $200 bill was a carryover from unpaid bills from the previous summer and that it was erroneously billed to me, the then current occupant. Whatever.

The point isn't about my electric bill though. The most amazing thing about the PMU administrators is that they absolutely didn�t care about their employees and their families. No one in administration ever assumed responsibility for anything, or made a decision that involved taking a hard position in the interest of fairness or justice. Faculty and other employees were never respected, much less treated like human beings, especially if we were women We were all just indentured servants to them�paid help.

For us women, they had a special level of contempt: they refused to allow us to even enter the administrative areas of the university. We could never talk to a male administrator face-to-face. If we wrote to them by email or called them on the phone, they could see it was a woman and usually refuse to answer. We were helpless. We had to enlist the help of male colleagues to try to further our causes on the male campus. It was maddening. The Saudis had control over everything that mattered to us: our money, our ability to travel freely, our healthcare, and even our dependents. It was one of the most frightening experiences I�ve ever had in my life. To this day, I�m not sure how I made it through the full 2-year contract. I can remember so vividly all the awful things that happened to us while we were there.

I only saw the Rector, Issa, three times in two years at public events. (According to student satisfaction surveys, I was a top-rated instructor, and no one EVER said �thank you� to me. I only learned about it because another faculty member, who was Filipino heard, about it from the Filipino admin men.) Issa doesn�t care about his faculty at all (in fact, I suspect he was/is contemptuous of us all). The year my cohort left, he didn�t even show up for the annual �thank you� ceremony although he was in town. We had waited 45 minutes for his arrival when it became clear he never had any intention of coming (June 2009). In fact, he was never on time to any event he ever came to. Once, on the women's campus, we waited over an hour for this important man to grace us with his presence.

Neither Issa nor any other senior administrator at PMY ever assumed responsibility for anything that went wrong. Issa consistently refused, and to this day continue to refuse, to meet with faculty to discuss their concerns (especially women faculty). And yet Issa was the court of last resort for anything we needed. Ditto the Vice Rector, Nassar, who was his chief henchman. But. boy, do those two get paid well, live it up, and travel first class! They owned the construction company that built the campus buildings, among other things. Right hand, left hand. The faculty might not get paid on time (one time we didn�t get our August 2008 pay until the end of September ostensibly because Issa wasn�t there to sign the paychecks, and there were several times that our pay was delayed a week or more), but Issa and company traveled in style all over the world! Meanwhile, having been without pay since July 2008, we were living on rice & beans. Literally. And don�t even get me started about how they treated the Filipinas/os or Bangladeshis that worked for them. That�s going to be in my book.

The turnover in PMU�s administration and faculty is sky-high. Anyone, such as Zydan or Admiral Latif, who had half a brain and an ounce of courage, was sacked in short order (Admiral Latif, who was a genuinely stand-up, decent guy, lasted about 6 months). No one in PMU administration ever said a simple, �I�m sorry� if something went wrong. It was never their fault; it was always someone else�s. And best if that someone else was an Indian, a Filipino, a woman or whatever. Any "inferior" person to blame would do. Out of over 120 faculty members when I started in 2007, there are only 10 left that I know of. (and 4 of those are women who cannot leave because of their husbands) PMU has been through innumerable admin personnel in HR, accounting, government relations, etc. Do the math.

I have never felt so intimidated or frightened as I was the two years I spent at PMU, and I have never felt this way about any other foreign country in which I have lived (12 of them over the years). I�m hardly the only one who ever suffered at the hands of PMU administrators. There are still folks whose dependents are being �held hostage� and have been denied entry visas for 7 months (the dependents have had them before, mind you), people who are denied bereavement leaves for deaths of siblings and parents, people whose exit visas have been revoked without prior notice (which they only find out when they try to cross the border to Bahrain), people who have found out they were fired when another instructor showed up to teach their class, etc. The stories are endless. And I would rather live in public housing in the poorest country on earth rather than in the housing PMU currently provides. It wasn�t that way. When we started in 2007, the housing was decent, but has evolved into this as money got tight. Speaking of which, the university doesn�t pay its bills when due (like to the contractors who built the university, or the book sellers). Check it out.

In short, PMU/Saudi Arabia is absolutely the worst place on the planet Earth you'd ever want to work. Don�t even think about going there unless you're a certifiable nut-case.

(MOD edit for names)

[trapezius]

Wow... that's just so #@#&$... I don't know what words to use.

I will buy your book when it comes out!

I have also saved your post in case it gets deleted or edited.

Good luck with the book and everything else.

[scot47]

Why did you stay two years ? Were you held against your will ?