 |
| You've got the contract, it doesn't mean you're going to get the cash... |
I worked in EFL, teaching English to people who have a different first language. It's fair to say that this profession can attract one or two oddballs, who may not fulfill their part of a contract. Equally, the language school where I worked in Russia did not always deliver on its promises.
The Russian management point of view seemed to be that contracts were something to be ignored. It didn't take long into my Siberian adventure to discover this and, in the first couple of months, there was quite a bit of unrest among the native speaker teachers over the pay. One day, three of us collected our pay and were all well down, by 5000 to 9000 Roubles, about £100-180 at the then exchange rate. It was all incredibly random and one person initially got 10,000 Roubles, impossible to earn on a pro-rata basis. At the same time, our line manager - Ian, a director of studies (DoS) with teaching duties got paid as a teacher, not as DoS.
It generated a lot of stress and arguments with Russian managers. While the local, Russian teachers there were working in fear for their jobs - it was a decent local salary, far more than in state schools, we, the foreign teachers and native speakers of English, weren't afraid. We were prepared to stand up to management. We handed in, and all signed, two letters of complaint, demanding an official response. We got one... we were handed, without consultation, timetables that well exceeded our contracted hours. Our answer was to refuse and to work to rule, but all we heard from headteachers was 'it's not my decision'.
Another teacher and I had a meeting with management to put our case across, a mixture of implying that we were prepared to quit en masse but trying to do that in a conciliatory tone - 'we appreciate that there's maybe a different management styles in different countries but...' and clearly articulating what was wrong: in particular, not paying in full and a lack of consultation. It worked and things improved over the rest of the year for the teachers, starting with getting the remainder of our pay, though even then the figures weren't exact. The ultimate boss, a mysterious, god-like figure, even descended from on high to organise an apology.
We were glad for ourselves that it was sorted but it had left us with little or no trust for the management and actually expecting further problems. The same wasn't true, sadly, for Ian. Forced into lots of teaching, even more than any other teacher, he'd still been doing as much of his DoS role as possible. Then management kindly paid him as a teacher saying that he was doing more teaching than anything else so should be paid as such. Without a teaching contract, he didn't even get pick up the overtime he'd have earned for the extra teaching hours. The writing was on the wall: two days before a crunch meeting with management, the bosses moved the school's headteacher into his office and they appointed a replacement headteacher the next day. In the meeting, he was told his position no longer existed but he could stay as a teacher... if he didn't like it, he could leave on Monday. He did.
Ian quickly lined up another job elsewhere and has remained settled in that place in the 10 years since. I didn't feel abandoned as he'd done the right thing by leaving, but I think that collectively we did feel isolated by it. He'd brought us in and had been the focal point, liaising between us and higher management and inducting us into the ways of the school and of Russia, something I still feel grateful for.
---
Elsewhere on this blog:
Fabio Capello's Contract Issues
Is working in Russia Right for You?
No comments:
Post a Comment