Korean Job Discussion Forums

Dodgy Al · Joined: 15 May 2004 Location: Seoul

A couple of posts on here have stated that the vacation for SMOE has been reduced to two weeks. Can anyone verify that, or are people just misreading the new contract. If it's true, it'll be the final nail in the SMOE coffin for me...

EDIT: also the etis webiste seems to be down. Coincidence? Considering all the bs that's going down, I wouldn't be surprised if there may be some other reason.

prideofidaho · Joined: 19 Mar 2008

No. I would not have signed the contract otherwise. I'm not sure why, but there seems to be a lot of misleading information about the SMOE contract floating around the past few days. Vacation is 21 business days with an additional 14 calendar days for renewing.

Big Mac · Joined: 17 Sep 2005

Are you sure it is 21 business days? Mine says 21 calendar days, though I'm not with SMOE but with an offshoot of EPIC (EPIS). It works out to about the same as the old contract, which was 14 work days.

prideofidaho · Joined: 19 Mar 2008

Yes. Why would an Epik contract be the same as a SMOE contract anyway?

Big Mac · Joined: 17 Sep 2005

I thought they were all either the same or very similar.

egrog1717 · Joined: 12 Mar 2008

Contract is clear about 21 days...
14 additional calendar days are provided should you choose to renew your contract...

In my case, however, the school and the district tried to pull a fast one on me this summer... Because there weren't enough days in the year to take all of my vacation AND go home for two weeks in August AND do a three week summer camp, they began to "strongly suggest" that I should take my 2 weeks home leave in during the Winter break... Which would completly throw off the camp/vacation schedule there, but they didn't seem to be able to comprehend that...
Took me three weeks and the absolutle threat of not renewing my contract to get them to see things my way... Took the last week of school off, then did 3 weeks camp, then a week off, then two weeks home...
For some reason when I suggested taking off the last week of school (to which we only have one real *day* anyway) they thought I was a genius... TiK...

buildbyflying · Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2009 8:24 am Post subject:

I have the 2009-10 SMOE contract. The way it's worded, teachers get 21 workdays paid, and 14 for renewal.
However, adn this is a big however, it's not necessarily clear.

21 work days in total as pursuant to article 5, which states the contract is 365 days. The contract does note calendar days, so we might assume, that workdays do not include weekends or holidays. But this is only in total. You are not guaranteed 21 days, only entitled to it. You are not allowed more than 21 days.
However, renewal is treated the same as a termination of the contract. The section for renewal is very clear on when you leave and return. It makes no statement about getting 21 in case of renewal. In fact, it explicitly states that renewals get 2 calendar weeks at the end of contract year for a home visit.