An experience at Baiyun Institute - they won't pay my salary

[shyaushu]

I am new to this forum but I have been an English teacher for seven years (I teach English at a university in the US).

In February, 2008, a school outside of Guangzhou, China named Baiyun Institute contacted me and offered me a job teaching English and business English at their school. My wife is Chinese and I speak Mandarin fairly well, and that seemed like an ideal place for us to spend the next year together in China so I accepted the job.

This is what happened to me:

In mid-April (after only 6 weeks at the school) a Chinese teacher who was the Foreign Teacher's Affairs Coordinator inexplicably began insulting me during a private meeting. She said "you are an idiot and you are too stupid to teach at this university". I excused myself and said, in leaving, I don't understand why you are being so discourteous to me" (in Chinese).

I then asked her supervisor for assistance in resolving a personnel matter, and I outlined my experience with that coordinator to her in an e-mail.

The coordinator, seeing my wife and I the next day on campus (we were returning from our daily ping pong game) accosted us, screaming "you complained to Nancy about me" at me and my wife, and assaulted us. We left aghast.

Soon after that her supervisor called me into her office, and told me I had to apologize to the coordinator for my "over-reaction" (?). The supervisor did not ask me for my account of the encounter, nor did she arrange for the "Coordinator" and I to speak with her together to resolve this.

I refused to apologize, saying the coordinator needs to apologize to me. She fired me. Then she refused to give me my salary for the 22 days I had worked in April. It is now May, and my wife and I have visited the Wage Enforcement Office in Guangzhou, and they say she still refuses to pay me and there is little they can do to help me.

I have learned that a teacher left this very school a few months ago and she also was not paid, and that not paying foreign faculty is the "rule" at Baiyun Institute (Baiyun Xue Yuan). Aside from that, the campus is very pleasant and the students generally bright and motivated. What a shame!

A word to the wise! Be very careful of working at this university! I do not advise it.