Korean Job Discussion Forums

[glass23]

http://www.eslcafe.com/jobs/korea/index.cgi?read=18160

I can��t believe the nerve that this hogwan owner has, advertizing on this Web site after the way he has treated his teachers. Here��s what I found out about ESS in the blacklists. It��s one of the worst ones in Korea and that says a lot!:

Medical coverage not paid. Inadequate accommodation, which the teacher has to pay for. Money is withheld for vacations and dubious deductions made. Overtime is not paid and neither is severance.

http://www.englishschoolwatch.org/notebook_detail.php?topic_id=2016
I quit ESS because of the lack of fairness and business sense at ESS resulting from the fact that the owner and his little brother (Kim Jae Il and Kim Tae Kyun) are incompetent and they don��t treat their teachers like human beings. They treat their teachers like game pieces that they use to make money, and that��s it. I left mainly for the following reasons:

1. My boss, Kim Tae Kyun, didn��t pay into the National Medical Coverage Plan for me, and when I asked him where my National Medical Coverage Card (Bohum Card) was he lied to me and told me there is no such thing in Korea. Further, when I asked him why he lied to me a few months after the fact, he lied to me again by saying that he didn��t lie to me in the first place. He did this more than once.

2. He was charging me rent, which is not standard for hogwans to do – and moreover for an insect-infested apartment with no air conditioning and poor insulation that��s located a half hour away from the school.

3. The teachers�� salary (1.8 million won per month) is lower than that of any of the foreign teachers that I met in Busan. That��s not OK, especially since my boss didn��t provide me with free housing. Also, he charged me a housing deposit and I had to commute two hours a day on crowded buses because my apartment was so far away and I was working a split shift.

4. My boss tried to stick me with a roommate at least three times even though I made it clear from the start that I didn��t want a roommate, and my apartment was too small for two people. (Just for the record my boss is a millionaire who lives in a very big place. He had life handed to him on a plate. He didn��t have to work for his money. His father just gave it to him. I��d like to know why he thinks he deserves to have so much more than the teachers who work so hard to make money for him. And, he even bragged to me about how rich his family is after offering me such a pathetic deal.)

5. I was lied to before I came to Korea about what I would be making for interviews and when I informed my boss of this once I got to Korea, he chose to ignore me.

6. I strongly suspect that my boss pocketed my taxes that he took from my paycheck. He never gave me any paperwork to suggest otherwise, and I shouldn��t have to ask for it either.

7. My boss repeatedly refused to be reasonable and decent when teachers were negotiating their contracts. On occasion he even rejected every condition that a teacher asked for.

8. He withheld the following money from me, which he would not pay me unless I finished my contract: the pension money that he deducted from my paycheck, my severance, the housing deposit, my vacation pay (which was reduced from the normal pay), and the cost of my flight home. This was one of the ways of forcing me to stay at ESS and trying to force me to put up with his abuse. (Severance pay is equal to one month��s salary, and it is the law that an employer must pay it to his/her employee once he/she has completed twelve months of work.)

9. There was a total lack of organization in his managing. It seems that as soon as a teacher is hired at ESS, another one quits or is fired. Having teachers come and go all the time creates an unstable and unorganized working environment.

10. My boss has repeatedly waited to the last minute to make decisions, which has cost the school more money and caused everyone at the school to experience unnecessary stress. My boss changed the vacation days for August with hardly any advanced notice time. That made it difficult for the teachers to plan vacations. He cancelled the ESS seminar day the day before it was to have taken place. If I had known that I would have that day off, then I could have planned a 3-day trip to Seoul or some other place. Further, he didn��t have Emma moved out of her apartment before Jen arrived. He moved me, Jen, and Julie into dirty apartments. He hired me, Julie, Jen, and Errol at the last minute, which only cost the institute more money and the teachers unnecessary stress because we didn��t have time to get properly oriented to ESS before we started teaching there. This irrational behavior of my boss�� has not changed. Two weeks before September started he still had two teachers to hire for September that he had not hired.

11. He continuously makes bad decisions in how he chooses to put money into the school. For example, why do the students need new lockers and a big screen TV in the lobby when one of the computers in the teachers�� room often gets a floppy disk stuck in it? The computers in the teachers�� room are running off of Windows 97, they don��t even have CD-burners, and one of them doesn��t even have a CD-Rom drive. The printers to the computers in the teachers�� room are constantly breaking down, and when teachers ask to have it fixed, they are repeatedly ignored. The copy machine in the teachers�� room never works. You would think that my boss would realize that only having one copy machine that works for a whole office full of teachers causes a lot of unnecessary stress for his teachers. I could go on.

12. My boss has showed horrible judgment in whom he has chosen to give power over teachers on numerous occasions.

13. My boss repeatedly showed bad judgment in his hiring practices by hiring people who don��t have the adequate qualifications and experience to be exceptional teachers, which means that he has been lying to the students by making them think that they are receiving an excellent education, when in fact they are not.

14. My boss was charging teenage kids 40,000 won per hour for private lessons, but he was only paying the teachers 16,500 won per hour to teach these kids. In one case in particular, he had a 12-year-old boy paying 40,000 won per hour for a teacher, who had no teaching experience.

15. My boss did not pay me for overtime work, which included 15 extra hours of work during the month of August helping him with human resources. He even had me come in and work on Sunday and didn��t pay me for it.

16. My boss tried not to pay Aria, one of ESS�� former teachers, his severance pay. (Severance pay is equal to one month��s salary, and it is the law that an employer has to pay it to his/her employee once he/she has completed twelve months of work. If you don��t believe me, then e-mail Aria yourself. [email protected]. This is what Aria and another former ESS teacher wrote on Dave��s ESL Café about my boss:
ESS is hell
Date: Wednesday, 25 September 2002, at 7:10 a.m.
In the last year ESS has lost 2 head foreign teachers and of the 15 native speakers who have signed on since 2000, just 1 remained for a second year! ESS had tried to shaft some teachers out of their severance pay, there have also been a couple of midnight runs by disgruntled teachers. The reason is the president (Ted), has the job by inheritance and is clueless about managing a business.

These days he is even in a worse mood because another hagwon has opened across the street from them and their student rates have dropped pretty sharply. Take my advice and stay away from ESS.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------http://www.eslcafe.com/korea/index.cgi?read+132710143980
ESS Must Be Blacklisted!
Posted By: X-ESS – [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, 25 September 2002, at 8:00 p.m.
I��m also a former ESS teacher who found Ted a disaster as a manager. I know the midnight runs and the illegal hold on teachers severance pays to be fact��.Someone should put some time into including ESS on all the Korea blacklists.

17. Jen worked 20 hours of overtime in the month of July that she was not paid overtime wages for.

18. My boss had Jen and Errol paying 300,000 won per month to live in a little apart6ment that was the size of a college dorm room. It didn��t even have a gas range, and it was 30 minutes away from the school. As I mentioned before, it is not standard for a hagwon to charge its teachers rent.

19. My boss tried to fire Julie, so he wouldn��t have to pay her severance pay and pension money. So, he tried to steal about 4 million won from her. (If you doubt what I��m saying about Julie and Jen, then you can e-mail them yourselves and ask them. Jen��s e-mail is [email protected] and Julie��s is [email protected].

20. Also, Aria and Julie are not the only cases of my boss trying to cheat his teachers out of their severance pay. There was another teacher my boss tried not to pay his severance to. He also tried not to pay this teacher his flight money. Because the school was losing students, my boss simply chose to blame it on this teacher, and he fired him before he could even finish his contract. Another teacher at the school at the time even took half pay for the month, so my boss wouldn��t fire him, but my boss still fired him.

21. Right before I left ESS my boss threatened to fire me. If he had fired me, then according to Korean law, I would have had to leave the country within 14 days. And, he implied that he would have me put in prison if I didn��t help him save face. He wanted to lie to my students and tell them that he��s a good person. In reality he is a liar, a bully, and a nickel-and-dime thief. I could not bring myself to lie for him. I tried to quit my job twice but my boss just laughed in my face. Because of Korean law I could not work at another hagwon without his permission. He knew this, and he abused this power over me. That��s why I could no longer stand to be lied to and pushed around, and I would not allow him to force me to stay in an unnecessarily and stupidly stressful situation. Nor could I watch him do this to my coworkers either.

22. None of the native speaking teachers that were at the school two months ago are there because they all have left. This September ESS has all new native speaking teachers, and two of them don��t even have any prior EFL teaching experience.

My boss has been mistreating teachers for years. He��s been warned in the past to treat his teachers better, but he still hasn��t learned his lesson. He doesn��t understand that to keep good teachers at ESS, he needs to learn to treat people better. That��s when teachers stay, not when he tries to coerce them to by withholding money from them or stealing it from them (!) and threatening them. He needs to change his ways or he will drive good teachers away and his school will go out of business.

Kim Jae Il and Kim Tae Kyun are just two insolent imbeciles, who inherited their father��s business and don��t know what to do with it. They��re still living in the past, riding their father��s coattails. ESS was a great hagwon because their father knew how to treat people. But now it is a horrible hagwon because the sons are incompetent two-bit used car salesmen, who steal a nickel or two from their students and their teachers whenever they can. Quite simply, they just don��t know how to treat people and they have no idea what they are doing, and that��s why ESS has so few students right now. It will only get worse from here.

[Homer]

Wow..that was quite the long rant....

[Grotto]

quite the rant for someones first post/troll

[glass23]

I aim to please.

[PRagic]

Get a Korean friend to help you out and report them. You can deal with the National Tax Office and the Korean Labor Board for starters.

You have to understand that this is still a very hierarchal culture. Especially if your boss was born with the silver spoon in his trap, he will view employees as assets. You are to be respectful and loyal, and he is to make money off of you. Them's the breaks.

One thing you will learn here is that, yes, Koreans are great people...unless you work for them! You will find that most Koreans nod and say yes in the office, then do anything they can to screw their bad bosses over behind their backs. Koreans, too, get screwed over on a daily basis, receive terribly low pay and little vacation, and have to smile while taking it.

[glass23]

PRagic I have my doubts about how helpful the Korean Tax Offices and Labor Boards are. Korea's plagued with corruption. I also have my doubts about Koreans having to smile at their bosses. It's not something they have to do. It's something they choose to do. One thing about Koreans is that they are horrible consumers. Rebellion's not a part of their culture. They're too busy trying to be "harmonious" to stand up for themselves and stand up against injustice and they tend to be too racist and self-absorbed to take pity on a foreigner.

[PRagic]

Quite a few people, including myself, have taken schools to the labor board and won. Happens every day, and they are quite sympathetic to foreign labor issues. Also, I doubt that a small school owner has much if any pull at with the tax authorities; that costs some serious dough.

Pretending that you get along with your boss IS a prerequisite for success here, and it is something you should do. When the harmony is violated, and they are pushed too far, however, there will indeed be action. Keep an eye out for the shaved heads, red bandanas, employees blockaded into an office while they ransack computers, police ID checks at downtown and university subway stations. Rebellion is not a part of their culture? Sorry, but you need to brush up on your Korean history!

[inkoreaforgood]

[RachaelRoo]

Glass23, not paying medical is definitely a blacklistable offence, but you hurt your overall credibility with some of the other complaints you make.

You write:

5. I was lied to before I came to Korea about what I would be making for interviews and when I informed my boss of this once I got to Korea, he chose to ignore me.


I don't understand this. You were lied to in your interview, or you agreed to a specific wage for doing interviews with students....??


6. I strongly suspect that my boss pocketed my taxes that he took from my paycheck. He never gave me any paperwork to suggest otherwise, and I shouldn��t have to ask for it either.


Strongly suspect because you weren't given paperwork? You need more than that as evidence for your allegation. And what do you mean by "shouldn't have to ask"? "Shouldn't" by what standard?

7. My boss repeatedly refused to be reasonable and decent when teachers were negotiating their contracts. On occasion he even rejected every condition that a teacher asked for.


So what? He has every right to refuse whatever a teacher wants put in their contract, and that teacher has every right to walk away from the bargaining. If he can't get a potential teacher to agree to the contract he is offering and he won't change it, then he'll have to take a different approach if he needs a teacher. That's how a free market works. Furthermore, the teacher may have been making ridiculous requests.


8. He withheld the following money from me, which he would not pay me unless I finished my contract: the pension money that he deducted from my paycheck, my severance, the housing deposit, my vacation pay (which was reduced from the normal pay), and the cost of my flight home. This was one of the ways of forcing me to stay at ESS and trying to force me to put up with his abuse. (Severance pay is equal to one month��s salary, and it is the law that an employer must pay it to his/her employee once he/she has completed twelve months of work.)


hunh? Did you or did you not complete your 12-month contract? If you didn't, then you aren't entitled to severance or a flight home - and what do you mean by vacation pay? Did you take a paid vacation and still get money deducted from your pay for it, or do you think he owes you money for a vacation you didn't get because you left your contract early?


9. There was a total lack of organization in his managing. It seems that as soon as a teacher is hired at ESS, another one quits or is fired. Having teachers come and go all the time creates an unstable and unorganized working environment.


This is an annoying one I have to deal with at my hagwon too, but it is a cultural thing and the standard here.

10. My boss has repeatedly waited to the last minute to make decisions, which has cost the school more money and caused everyone at the school to experience unnecessary stress. My boss changed the vacation days for August with hardly any advanced notice time. That made it difficult for the teachers to plan vacations. He cancelled the ESS seminar day the day before it was to have taken place. If I had known that I would have that day off, then I could have planned a 3-day trip to Seoul or some other place. Further, he didn��t have Emma moved out of her apartment before Jen arrived. He moved me, Jen, and Julie into dirty apartments. He hired me, Julie, Jen, and Errol at the last minute, which only cost the institute more money and the teachers unnecessary stress because we didn��t have time to get properly oriented to ESS before we started teaching there. This irrational behavior of my boss�� has not changed. Two weeks before September started he still had two teachers to hire for September that he had not hired.


Same.

11. He continuously makes bad decisions in how he chooses to put money into the school. For example, why do the students need new lockers and a big screen TV in the lobby when one of the computers in the teachers�� room often gets a floppy disk stuck in it? The computers in the teachers�� room are running off of Windows 97, they don��t even have CD-burners, and one of them doesn��t even have a CD-Rom drive. The printers to the computers in the teachers�� room are constantly breaking down, and when teachers ask to have it fixed, they are repeatedly ignored. The copy machine in the teachers�� room never works. You would think that my boss would realize that only having one copy machine that works for a whole office full of teachers causes a lot of unnecessary stress for his teachers. I could go on.


It's his school and he is perfectly entitled to make bad decisions. Perhaps he felt that the school would attract more students with the t.v. in the hall, whereas buying a new printer for the teachers would not bring in more $$. Why do you care about this one?

14. My boss was charging teenage kids 40,000 won per hour for private lessons, but he was only paying the teachers 16,500 won per hour to teach these kids. In one case in particular, he had a 12-year-old boy paying 40,000 won per hour for a teacher, who had no teaching experience.


I find this complaint to be the strangest. He is charging for lessons with a foreigner - you teach for the overtime rate agreed to, and the student pays what is agreed to. What does it matter that the teacher had no experience and why would you care about that? Most of us had no experience when we came here - we all have to start somewhere.


20. Also, Aria and Julie are not the only cases of my boss trying to cheat his teachers out of their severance pay. There was another teacher my boss tried not to pay his severance to. He also tried not to pay this teacher his flight money. Because the school was losing students, my boss simply chose to blame it on this teacher, and he fired him before he could even finish his contract.

What matters here is when the teacher was fired - at the 11 month mark or after a few months? One girl at my school almost got fired for gross incompentence at the six month point, and she felt she should be entitled to half of her severance pay - even though she isn't and trust me, she really did deserve to be fired (constantly late, that kind of thing).

It's not my intention to rip you apart. Not paying the medical and giving you a crap apartment are not o.k., but most of your complaints are either lacking in the necessary detail or are illegitimate things to complain about. Also, you write quite a lot about how your boss inherited his money - yes it's annoying that we live in a system where people don't always work for what they have, but that's irrelevant to your point and it takes attention away from your legitimate complaints.

[andrew]

*****

[glass23]

Anyone who thinks Korea is a rebellious society is out of touch with reality. Well, at least Andrew gets the point. The only thing I'm surprised about is that the hogwon owner at ESS was actually candid to him about the fact that he fires teachers so he doesn't have to pay their severance pay and airfare. Here's the point. STAY AWAY FROM ESS! IT'S A LIVING HELL!!

[some waygug-in]

He did pay mine. When did you work there? I can't say there weren't things I didn't like about the place, but I have to say that it's still WAY BETTER THAN whatever else is out there.

[bellum99]

Every person has a different point of view. One person will say the school is great and the other will say it is bad. I go with the most..so if I know many bad things but only one good thing about a school, then it is a bad school (I know that people who like it don't post much but that is the way it goes).
1/2 the time it is the teachers fault that their expereience at a school is bad. There are some very terrible teachers out there. Basically I try to keep my head down, stay out of personal conflicts and avoid too much time with the boss. I never take things too serious because it is always a short term problem with a school...I will be moving on in a short while.
Sorry it sucked for you OP.

[jinju]

[some waygug-in]

In the region. I can't compare it to schools in Seoul or cities other than Busan, as I haven't lived/worked there.

I didn't say it was great, I said I got paid. If you want to know more, PM me.

Of the 4 "schools" I've worked for in Korea so far, it was the best organized and run. The wage was lower than kids's schools but is comparable to Pagoda. At least they offered housing.

When I was there, I whined and complained too, but then after I left I found out what "bad" was.