Job Discussion Forums

[TK4Lakers]

Hello all, this is my first time posting on this website.

I was recently offered a job as an ALT from Interac and I accepted, and start date is said to be in early April.

I was wondering, when will I recieve my placement and additional info. on my job and housing situaton?

In addition, Interac does not offer an apt through a company, but helps you search for one through the cities. How hard is it to find a decent apartment, and to fill it up with furnishings?

Interac asks you to bring atleast $5000 US dollars, is this reasonable or exaggerated?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

[allyismycopilot]

I have two friends that work for Interac and one of them was told what school/town they were heading to and the other didn't know until a few weeks before they were supposed to depart.

So, you may not know what school/area you will be in until a few weeks before departure. However they should let you know what airport you need to fly into so that will give you a clue as to the general region.

As for bringing 5000 dollars along... its reasonable. Finding an apartment and basic living expenses are going to have to come out of your pocket until you get your first pay check.

You can come with less of course but if you are capable of bringing 5k with you it would make things much easier on you.

The biggest reason for bringing that much money is getting into whatever apartment you find. The fees are quite excessive in many cases with deposit, key money, etc.. (If you search you will find a ton of inormation on getting into an apartment and all the fees associated... I believe Jim Dunlop wrote a good, informative article on it).

You may be able to easily find an apartment that does require you to pay key money but it depends on where you end up. A good site to take a look at is www.able.co.jp as they have apartments throughout Japan.

The furnishing is the easy part. Japan is "throw-away" society and they tend to junk pefectly good items like tvs, furniture, etc.. A little gome shopping goes a long way. lol. You will be able to find really good deals at second hand stores. Its amazing how much you can get with just a few hundred dollars :p

[Glenski]

[azarashi sushi]

Just another thing the be aware of... The wage for April is prorated. You don't work a full month so you won't be paid for a full month. As well as that, I believe Interac pay their wages on the last day of the following month (Can someone confirm this?). So it will be 3 months before you receive a full month's pay.

Regarding apartments, as others have said, it's expensive to set yourself up here. I don't know about other areas... I live in Tokyo ... But rent and key money etc is expensive. Although there are cheaper places around and places that require less key money/deposit, in my experience, you wouldn't want to live in most of those places. If it's cheap, there is something MAJOR wrong with it. For a decent place in Tokyo, you will almost certainly have to pay 2 months deposit, 2 months key money, 1 month agent's fee and 1 month rent up front. In my case, I also had to pay insurance charges with came to about another month's rent. So that was about 7 month's up front.

So $5000 won't go very far.

[Seeker of truth]

I suggest you do a google search on Interac to see what you're getting into. Interac can be a good stepping stone into the ESL industry in Japan, but they have a high turnover rate for a reason. www.gaijinpot.com has a few threads about Interac, but Interac does threaten to pull its advertising from gaijinpot.com whenever a negative thread about them shows up.

[Big John Stud]

tkimura wrote:

Hello all, this is my first time posting on this website. I was recently offered a job as an ALT from Interac and I accepted, and start date is said to be in early April. I was wondering, when will I recieve my placement and additional info. on my job and housing situaton? In addition, Interac does not offer an apt through a company, but helps you search for one through the cities. How hard is it to find a decent apartment, and to fill it up with furnishings? Interac asks you to bring atleast $5000 US dollars, is this reasonable or exaggerated? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

$5,000 is not exaggerated. In fact you will need at least that much depending on where they assign you!

One friend was offered a positon and told where he was going to be. When he got to Japan, he was told the contract was canceled. Eventually he did get a job though.
Interac hires more people than they do contracts. In hopes if they get contracts at the last second they can fill them.

Good luck!

[yamanote senbei]

tkimura, ALT work can be satisfying, but please keep in mind that the ALT dispatch business is a racket and and has a high employee turnover. Do your research before you make the final decision to go to Japan so you aren't surprised when you finally get there. This would be a good place to start:

http://nambufwc.org/issues/alt/

[wangtesol]

Ditto on what the people above said, except for the guy from Indianapolis. He sounds like a former or current manager for Interac. The ALT business uses illegal gyomu itaku contracts. The Japanese Ministry of Education announced in February 2005 that such contracts were illegal. (These are contracts that companies sign with boards of education, not you). Yamanote Sembei already gave you the link for more information on these illegal ALT system.

It is actually a violation of Japanese labour law for an employer not to tell an employee where his workplace will be (i.e., what city) when a contract is signed. You can contact the Labor Standards Office in the region you move to and report Interac. There are free interpretters available in most parts of Japan at Internation Associations that do this all the time for foreign workers at Labor Standards Offices. There is a list of these offices also available at the Nambu FWC website. www.nambufwc.org

So strike one against Interac.

There is a Interac branch union available. Monthly dues are around 2000 yen/month. www.interacunion.org

Putting up key money is bs. ALTs in the JET Programme do not put up key money. Why should it be different for you?

(God, in my Chinese class today the reading was titled "Cheating Foreigners". It is just second nature in Japan and China to do so. Here is part of the vocabulary I had to learn.)

上當= to be fooled
老外 = foreigner
懷疑 = to suspect
受騙 = to be deceived
外賓 = foreign guest
傻子 = fool
便 = to cheat
國外 = abroad
難免 = inevitable
經驗 = experience

There is also an expression in Chinese "hulihutu" which means to be confused. In this context, your employer will try to confuse you in order to cheat you.

Some ALT outfits have corporate contracts with an apartment rental company called Leo Palace where the rates are actually higher than normal. It is a way to indenture you to the employer.

There are lots of scams that ALT companies run. Check 'em out.

[homersimpson]

[guest of Japan]

Homersimpson is 100% correct. Still, I don't doubt that Nova puts teachers in a Leo palace and makes a lttle extra off the top.

Leo Palace may be a bit of a rip off, but it is one of the better options for foreigners without deep connections and a lot of up-front money.

WangTESOL, if you want to go to war against dispatch companies, could you please give something useful other than your standard gomi otaku argument. You're beginning to sound like Bush making justifications for Iraq.

[Willy_In_Japan]

When I worked for GEOS, they put me in a LEO Palace and I had to pay all the utilities.......electricity, water, gas.......GEOS gave a stipend of 15,000 for living in Kanto, (to help with higher costs of apartments).......my apartment was 15 mins away from the station on foot.....was a small apartment, and roach infested and they charged me 62,500 a month....I can't see how they didn't have a kickback deal going with GEOS........GEOS would take my rent money directly out of my pay, so anything is possible. They could have told me LEO Palace was charging me 70,000 a month and I wouldn't have had any way of knowing.

It cost me with utilities about as much as a shared Nova apartment but at least my place was my own.

[homersimpson]

I think I figured out what's going on here. Some of you are confused by the process. If you have your employer arrange your housing, as in the case of the guy who worked for GEOS, then you are at the mercy of your employer. If GEOS collected utility fees and rent from you every month, then you did not rent a LEO PALACE apartment; GEOS leased it and basically sublet it to you. They were more than likely skimming off the top. I'm talking about going into the nearest LP office and filling out the paperwork yourself. As I said, the rents are higher than standard market, and you have to pay for your entire stay up front, but there are some benefits: Your employer has no control or access to your apartment, no monthly utility bills, furnished, neighbors leave you alone because most are temporary residents and couldn't less what you do or when you do it, etc. I'm stopping now cause I sound like a damn LP commercial.

[Willy_In_Japan]

Geos didnt collect utility fees from me. They came in the form of a usage bill, just like if I lived in a regular apartment. They collected only the RENT.

So, if Leo Palace fees include utilities, it is news to me.

GEOS arranged the renting of the apartment, but paid my rent directly from my pay.......therefore, they could have a kickback scheme going, and nobody would be the wiser. Doesn't 62,500 seem a little high with no utilities included?

[injapantoday]

It's called supply and demand!

[wangtesol]

It is not about supply and demand; it is more about cheating foreigners. The private language school industry does not work on free market principles. In fact, government subsidies are still given towards tuition fees.

And the gyomu itaku system that Interac uses is illegal. They get 600 students a year from their religious associate, Brigham Young University, to work on these illegal contracts. Without BYU students thumbing their noses at the rule of law (or being ignorant of it), there arguable would be no dispatch ALT system.

Come out to the March in March to protest in the streets of Tokyo against such illegal pratices....www.nambufwc.org

As for the Leo Palace issue, I think you corrected yourself there. I refered to an ALT company having a corporate contract with Leo Palace, not an individual ALT. Of course, anybody can rent at Leo Palace, but to further cheat foreigners the ALT company will sublet the Leo Palace place to the ALT, of course, providing another source of profit for the dispatching company.