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cangringo
Joined: 18 Jan 2007
Posts: 327
Location: Vancouver, Canada
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 Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 11:06 pm Post subject: |
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I have to agree that it depends on the situation. We had a very valid reason for leaving early from jobs in Monterrey. Our work visas were denied and we had to leave the country. We talked to our employers and apologized profusely for leaving them in the lurch but it couldn't be helped.
I think if you are able to survive on your pay and the situation is not overbearingly bad then stick it out. However, if you are finding yourselves in a situation where you can't even afford to live it's a different story. I still think it's appropriate to give some notice but sometimes things can't be helped. I don't agree that you should stay or feel obligated to stay when the contract has been broken by the school or they are treating you badly. That is their roe to hoe and they are the ones doing a disservice to the students. I've talked to many students and they understand that. |
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tedkarma
Joined: 17 May 2004
Posts: 1598
Location: The World is my Oyster
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| Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 12:49 am Post subject: |
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There was a time when I was strongly in the "take your lumps and tough it out" camp - but there was also ONE time in my 15 years of TEFLing when I did break a contract. I can also count at least three times when schools broke their contracts and promises (one of which includes the school I left mid-contract).
We all have our "excuses" and reasons, I had mine.
Bottom line, I certainly didn't feel good about bailing - even today, but it was the right decision at the right time.
In addition to concern about the students, I also was concerned about my co-workers who were possibly saddled with extra work they didn't want (though I gave about 30 days notice on breaking the contract). |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 2:43 am Post subject: |
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| My one time came when my pay was cut unilaterally and retroactively to the beginning of the year. |
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cspitzig
Joined: 01 Nov 2007
Posts: 56
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| Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 4:24 am Post subject: |
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| rusmeister wrote: |
| My one time came when my pay was cut unilaterally and retroactively to the beginning of the year. |
Retroactive pay cut? Does that mean what you had been previously paid came out of your future pay? Is that legal(not to mention them breaking the contract)? |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 9:22 am Post subject: |
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| cspitzig wrote: |
| rusmeister wrote: |
| My one time came when my pay was cut unilaterally and retroactively to the beginning of the year. |
Retroactive pay cut? Does that mean what you had been previously paid came out of your future pay? Is that legal(not to mention them breaking the contract)? |
Of course it wasn't legal. Neither was it fair or what we had agreed upon. That's why I left. |
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ktodba
Joined: 02 Aug 2006
Posts: 54
Location: UK
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007 11:10 pm Post subject: |
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not being funny, they broke the contract not you.
We only have to keep to the contract if our employers do. If they break the terms then we are free to do what we want - obviously it might involve not getting paid and finding out that it will cost more to get our money than we get in compensation.
Welcome to the jungle baby |
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naturegirl321
Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 9041
Location: home sweet home
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| Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2007 3:55 am Post subject: |
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| I might have to break contract. Although I-m only here for four months, it-s getting harder and harder to be away from my husband. |
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GambateBingBangBOOM
Joined: 04 Nov 2003
Posts: 2021
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2007 2:26 am Post subject: Re: sorry merlin |
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| dolmie wrote: |
In the absence of laws to protect you, teachers can flake out and leave their colleagues and students in the lurch. I like what you said, Justin, about giving one's word, and fulfilling it, because you said so. It's simple--like we learned when we were little--we said we'd do something, so we do it (except in the worst situations).
l. |
This is the main issue. There often are no laws to protect you, because as a foreigner, there is nothing you can do. Your Japanese employer decided to say that you can never take the vacation time listed in your contract? They make you pay for every little thing that the school requires for you to do your job (like textbooks for the students etc) because they say they pay you so much that you can afford it? So what? Nobody's going to help you. You can go to a lawyer, but at the end of the day, you are a foreigner in this country, and they don't consider you to be important.
The JET program is supposed to be one of the best deals for starting out EFL teachers. In terms of pay, it certainly is, but in my four years on the programme, the last two included a lot of informal councelling to JETs. Some of them are in absolute shit situations, and their bosses at their BoEs and schools use the fact that they don't know the rules to try to make claims that absolutely ridiculous behaviour is part of Japanese culture (like sexual assault of female JETs at drinking parties, monitoring computers used at home etc).
All you have to do is look at the Korean job discussion forum, and you'll see tonnes of examples of situations in which breaking contract would be totally justified.
Employers who want their employees to stick around for a while will try to ensure that they are happy with their jobs. EFL teachers are often thought of as temporary employees at best and so some employers think they can do whtever they want and the person will stay until the end of their contract. I've seen some BoEs who didn't even realize that it was possible for JETs to quit and so approached the contract as "This is what they HAVE to do, but I can add on a bunch more stuff and it doesn't matter. Even though it says I have to do this, I dont because there is nothing that they can do because they cannot quit, and there is nobody they can turn to". |
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ktodba
Joined: 02 Aug 2006
Posts: 54
Location: UK
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| Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2007 11:55 pm Post subject: |
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I'm going to be pedantic here.
If you break a contract then you are in the wrong no matter how you try and justify it.
A contract is a two way agreement between you the teacher and the school. If you agreed to it at the beginning and the school expected you to keep to your agreement then you have no excuse for breaking the contract - you want to determine what your job is? Become the boss!
If the school does not honour the agreement you made at the beginning? Then they have broken the contract not you and you have some leeway.
When people enter into agreements they have no intention of keeping they devalue the whole industry and that is why I feel we need to keep to any agreement we make. Let's make it clear who is in the wrong. |
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GambateBingBangBOOM
Joined: 04 Nov 2003
Posts: 2021
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Sun Nov 25, 2007 8:12 am Post subject: |
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| ktodba wrote: |
If the school does not honour the agreement you made at the beginning? Then they have broken the contract not you
....
Let's make it clear who is in the wrong. |
Exactly. But assuming employers will keep to their end of the contract is assuming that a contract means the same thing to them as you. In some countries, it doesn't. Sometimes, a contract is seen as a starting point for the employer. In that case, the employee may think of the employer as breaking the contract by demanding unpaid overtime etc. The employer isn't going to see it that way, and in fact won't really see what's wrong with telling a contract employee that even though they said they would do one thing int he contract, it turns out that they won't.
In Japan, Japanese people do what their employer tells them to do, even if it isn't their job, and occasionally even if it isn't legal (the boss can then deny having known about it and the employee can say they were just following orders and in the end nobody goes to jail, but somebody has to bow and quit with a lot of tears only to be rehired the next day under a different job title). For a foreigner to question their boss does not come across to them the same way a contract employee saying they are paid to do a job stipulated in the contract, not other stuff, just that job to their employer in Canada or the US or anywhere.
So since this is the system, the employer is NEVER going to see that they have broken the contract, so as the employee, you have to understand what's in your contract, what you're being asked to do on top of that and what you are supposed to be able to get that actually you do not. Then you decide for yourself when the breking point comes- and that is almost always when a better job / option comes along, or when a personal problem makes you bitter about everything you have to do that is outside of your contract. |
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merlin
Joined: 10 May 2004
Posts: 582
Location: Somewhere between Camelot and NeverNeverLand
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| Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 8:33 pm Post subject: |
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| If you break a contract then you are in the wrong no matter how you try and justify it. |
It's thinking like this that makes it impossible to resolve the Israeli - Palestinian issue. Bull-headed people just think they are "right" - no matter how many logical and rational arguments can be made to the contrary. So 6,000 years ago some Jewish guy gave his fair-skinned son his inheritance obtained through false pretenses and trickery and Israelis to this day use that flimsy "contract" as a reason to not give an inch on the Palestinian issue.
On the other hand, even though Joseph and the Jewish people were sold into bondage in a legal and binding contract by his brothers, Joseph and the Jewish people with the assistance of God violated that legal contract by pulling a runner across the red sea.
So a person can say something is "wong" all they want to but we see in the Biblical precedent of the Book of Exodus that christians at least are not morally obligated to follow through on a contract in extenuating circumstances.
I'm not Christian at all, but since so much of western civilization is based on Christian "morality" I just thought I'd point out this inconsistency. |
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ktodba
Joined: 02 Aug 2006
Posts: 54
Location: UK
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| Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 10:41 pm Post subject: |
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sorry Merlin but trying to compare a contract today with biblical times isn't really doing it for me. Law onlty exists if the poplulace accept it as law which for me means if you agree to do something then you do it. If you agreed to do something wrong then it is automatically null and void under international law. We are protected from the past as a result of what happened in the past. In other words just because it has happened once doesn't mean it has to happen again.
Deliberatly breaking a contract cannot be acceptable - and that goes for both sides, if you don't believe it don't sign it.
As for Joseph etc. being sold in a legal and binding contract - slavery is illegal today so I'd challentge that straight away - not to mention the fact that false representation renders a contract null and void which was my point - if the contract has already been brocken you are not in breach of contract. |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 4:51 am Post subject: |
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| merlin wrote: |
| Quote: |
| If you break a contract then you are in the wrong no matter how you try and justify it. |
It's thinking like this that makes it impossible to resolve the Israeli - Palestinian issue. Bull-headed people just think they are "right" - no matter how many logical and rational arguments can be made to the contrary. So 6,000 years ago some Jewish guy gave his fair-skinned son his inheritance obtained through false pretenses and trickery and Israelis to this day use that flimsy "contract" as a reason to not give an inch on the Palestinian issue.
On the other hand, even though Joseph and the Jewish people were sold into bondage in a legal and binding contract by his brothers, Joseph and the Jewish people with the assistance of God violated that legal contract by pulling a runner across the red sea.
So a person can say something is "wong" all they want to but we see in the Biblical precedent of the Book of Exodus that christians at least are not morally obligated to follow through on a contract in extenuating circumstances.
I'm not Christian at all, but since so much of western civilization is based on Christian "morality" I just thought I'd point out this inconsistency. |
I sympathize very much with your feelings about the wrongness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, it looks like you are speaking as if there is no ultimate right or wrong (at least as far as Israelis are concerned) regardless of who is to blame for what in that conflict. (Maybe I misread you.)
As far as the question of right and wrong relates to the OP, I like to refer to Chesterton's words on the subject of moral relativism and the modern fad for denying right and wrong (which we immediately spurn as soon as a wrong is done to us):
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It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: "The golden rule is that there is no golden rule." We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters--except everything.
Examples are scarcely needed of this total levity on the subject of cosmic philosophy. Examples are scarcely needed to show that, whatever else we think of as affecting practical affairs, we do not think it matters whether a man is a pessimist or an optimist, a Cartesian or a Hegelian, a materialist or a spiritualist. Let me, however, take a random instance. At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, "Life is not worth living." We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories do not matter. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, ch1 |
and a general comment on blaming Christian morals for situations like these:
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| Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, ch 1 |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 5:11 am Post subject: |
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| ktodba wrote: |
sorry Merlin but trying to compare a contract today with biblical times isn't really doing it for me. Law onlty exists if the poplulace accept it as law which for me means if you agree to do something then you do it. If you agreed to do something wrong then it is automatically null and void under international law. We are protected from the past as a result of what happened in the past. In other words just because it has happened once doesn't mean it has to happen again.
Deliberatly breaking a contract cannot be acceptable - and that goes for both sides, if you don't believe it don't sign it.
As for Joseph etc. being sold in a legal and binding contract - slavery is illegal today so I'd challentge that straight away - not to mention the fact that false representation renders a contract null and void which was my point - if the contract has already been brocken you are not in breach of contract. |
I don't understand this as written (we all write stuff late at night at times). It would seem to be saying that history doesn't affect us, and that we are somehow protected from repeating history. The main fallacy here is in thinking that modern times are somehow superior - the word 'modern' itself being merely a temporary state - all times are modern unto themselves. I think Merlin is far closer to the truth in acknowledging that history does indeed affect us and that we can repeat it. In addition, we do see that on the whole, history does repeat - a cycle may turn in a slightly different way, certain social mores may impact on the repetition, but certainly civilizations do rise and fall, power does gravitate to a center that eventually becomes corrupt, etc... An army of wage slaves may replace peasants, but the similarity of caste systems, the haves vs the have-nots, etc, remains the same.
What is illegal today can always become legal tomorrow - and vice-versa. Give us a serious enough change in our world, via over-population, an asteroid or comet hitting us, or whatever, and we could easily see a worldwide return to past conditions, some of which were indeed heinous, although I imagine we could find some superior ones as well. And even that is not necessary to seeing how international law can turn against the little man and ultimate serve the major financial and business concerns that need to explot the little man to produce their wealth.
I do agree that if a contract has already been broken by the other side, you can hardly be held in breach of contract. |
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GambateBingBangBOOM
Joined: 04 Nov 2003
Posts: 2021
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 6:31 am Post subject: |
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I think when people start talking about "Christian morales" then any arguement has gone to the point of being ridiculous.
I think if you feel an employer is treating you really horribly, and there's nothing you can do to change it, then rather than lose your sanity, you should leave your job.
But I think a problem with this industry and contracts in particular seems to be that many employers honestly don't have their employees best interests at heart, but many of the employees have just graduated university and really don't come across as particularly mature and seem to be ready to quit at the drop of a hat.
I think you should be able to walk away from a really bad situation, espcecially if a good situation has presented itself and staying would essentially guarantee joblessness at the end of a contract from hell (hiring season issues). But I think entering a contract with the intention of breaking it down the line isn't a good thing to do, especially when the people you work for are nice and help you out as much as they can. (Yes, I realize that I am approaching this as a 'if the people you work for are rotten then go ahead and break the contract. If they are really nice to you, then you should stick it out' and I also realize that that's not a very business decision way to approach it, but maybe that's why I'm not a high finance type of a guy). |
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