I remember talking to a friend before I was supposed to begin teaching English here in Japan. “Don’t fool yourself,” he said. “Anyone can do this job—it’s the McJob of Asia.” Not the sort of advice a young graduate is going to take seriously, but after a few years in the game, I’m starting to see where he was coming from.
Teaching English in Japan was never dignified—nor was it ever going to be, with “genkiness” prized over “professionalism”—but at least it was well-compensated. Yet with Japan’s lost decade extending way past the ten-year mark, English teachers are feeling the recessional tug. Where once the JET program supplied public schools all over Japan with a fresh crop of graduates every year, now there’s a bleak landscape of dispatch companies feeding off the bloated body of government-run JET and cutting every corner (and labor law) they can. McJobs? It was once just a mildly funny joke. Now it’s a way of life for many Westerners trying to make a living teaching English.
Dispatch companies are a great deal for cash-strapped Board of Educations (BOEs). Not only can BOEs have native English speakers in local schools for a lower cost than either hiring privately or using the JET program, but the draining task of dealing with a crop of largely non-Japanese-speaking foreigners is farmed out to someone else. The BOEs save time and money; the act of hiring, firing and training recruits falls to the dispatches.
But for those of us employed by one of these dispatch companies, the difference is astounding. Forget the luxury of free airfares and subsidized housing—de rigueur even for jobs in South Korea. These days, most teachers do without health insurance, pension plans and unemployment insurance. Dispatch higher-ups will tell you this is because instructors work part-time hours. But with most teachers starting at 8am and working until 4pm, their excuses ring hollow. This situation is a clear violation of Japanese labor standards, but BOEs pass the buck, and dispatch companies laugh all the way to the bank.
The backwards regression doesn’t stop there. My own recent experience with a dispatch company left me working on a tourist visa for nearly three months. It’s a serious offense to be caught working without a proper visa, but my company told me it wasn’t a problem; it is common practice and I shouldn’t worry about it. But that didn’t change the fact it was illegal, and I dreaded approaching anyone who looked remotely like a police officer.
And let’s not forget it isn’t just about teachers getting screwed out of a decent salary. The students also get a bum deal. In a special report that ran on the Nippon News Network last summer, a panel of parents and students were interviewed about their English classes. One boy said that he had had as many as seven or eight teachers in one year, and another girl who had no less than four teachers said it was hard to make a connection with English instructors because they were constantly streaming in and out of school. The revolving door mentality of a McJob is rearing its ugly head.
When I was introduced at my local BOE just three months ago, the staff expressed hope that my fellow teachers and I would stay with them for many years. But if that was their goal, then they’re really clueless. They’ve provided no incentive to stay: my starting salary will never increase, and I’ll never get the full-time benefits mandated by law. I have been made to feel interchangeable and disposable. And I am: if I quit, there will be many other eager applicants waiting for my job.
If the BOEs really wanted to keep teachers around long-term, the first thing to do would be to increase private hires. But this can’t be done without the government enforcing labor legislation that’s already on the books. As it stands, the bidding system that many BOEs use to dish out contracts makes the dispatch companies that actually do follow the law uncompetitive. And so the downward spiral continues.
The heyday of the JET program is waning, and the good old times aren’t coming back. To be sure, JET had its problems—it was difficult to fire bad teachers, and good teachers couldn’t be retained for more than five years. Dispatch companies were supposed to fix these problems, but instead, they are adding to them. When you have four different English teachers in a school year, it’s a problem. When you have seven? It’s a complete failure on the part of the Japanese school system.
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7 Comments
Lisa Gray’s article about AET’s and dispatch companies was interesting. It seems the golden era of young people from native-speaking countries teaching English for a substantial reward has ended. In 1999-2000 I worked as an AET on the JET Program for a year in a small town near Mito City, Ibaraki. As I’d already gotten my Master’s in ESL, working in a Junior High School environment wasn’t really my cup of tea, so I ran out my contract and then moved down to Tokyo to find “a real job”. A few years later, when I was working quite happily as a college English Instructor, I would often run into AET’s employed by these dispatch companies when I was out and about. They would invariably tell me horror stories about their working conditions. For the first time, I realized how lucky I was to have caught the tail-end of the era when JET’s worked directly for a local Board of Education. Although I didn’t care much for my year in JET at the time, I now appreciate the firm foundation it gave me for a nine-year working stay in Japan.
I’m strongly minding about the status and live of dispatched ALTs and the friendship between ALTs and children. Though I admit the dispatch system aids the BOEs due to their deficit and the shorthand to take care of ALT, it is a silly short cut in education.
What is the most important part of ALTs at schools ? It is not only teach language to children but also to let them know the difference and interesting points from foreign people. For these purpose, firm friendship and reliance are mandatory.
To fulfill the required character and ability for the ALTs, full time contract, money and benefits should be given.
I would like to assert that Japan Government should get JET program back on track again to provide well-qualified ALTs to the children who shoulder the international correspondence of the next generation.
Let’s not forget all the money the dispatch companies make off the ALTs as well. For if you miss a day of work they usually take double your day’s pay. Also remember they take a cut of your salary from the BOE. Let’s say you make 200,000 yen per month. Chances are your dispatcher makes 10,0000 yen off of you. Now multiply that times however many ALT’s they have all over the place. The BOE will keep handing money over so they don’t have to do the work themselves. Like most things in this country it’s all built around lies, laziness, and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. It’s juvenile and absurd.
So it’s better to do your own job hunting and/or teach through the internet…
I thought Japanese companies were more law-abiding – how do they let you work without a proper visa?
Lisa’s article is thorough and true. And this atrocity is not limited to dispatch companies. I worked for an English preschool in Yokohama that regularly skirted what is legal for the foreign teachers’ contracts and often (blatantly) ignored labor laws for its Japanese staff and demanded overtime without pay as well as made unsubstantiated deductions from their monthly salaries. One extreme case included 72 “volunteer overtime hours” for its part-time staff workers as chaperones for a trip out to the country with several children. (And forget about regular overtime for its full-time staff.) These “English trips” that they organized were set up to milk as much money from customers/parents as possible. For the teachers, typically, the company would deduct more money for absences than it actually paid for the day’s work, even if the teacher was staying out for a legitimate reason such as influenza or other illness. After all, spreading a disease throughout any school will not serve anyone’s best interest.
Other problems: forget about proper breaks between classes nor proper time for class preparation. The owners, a husband and wife team, were unrelenting in their view of how the classes should be taught, even if it conflicted with known, successful methods of teaching. Neither of them could speak English well enough to be understood. Typically, conversations were a mix of English and Japanese; staff meetings were exclusively in Japanese. That’s not criminal but does paint the picture that the owners did not have a vested interest in the language of English itself, but rather making as much money off of it as possible.
After quitting, I attempted to take up a case with the local labor office for lost wages but the case went nowhere. The case worker took my documents and met with the owners to discuss it. The owners, reportedly, bullied the case worker and even threatened to sue me for reasons unclear.
It’s ironic that in a country that has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world, and whose citizens are generally good-hearted and law-abiding, white-collar crime is alive and well. Until the proper authorities take this problem seriously, it will continue as long as these companies can make a profit.
I came to Japan in 2001 and worked for a big British eikaiwa. They had some shady practices but were far from being the worst. Horror stories were everywhere but everybody knew that they just had to hold tight with them for a year or two and then move on to better things. Well, that was the theory anyway. We all had friends that had been here for years and had good steady jobs worth staying for. Everybody saw themselves doing the same thing and maybe settling here for good. Unfortunately, things changed rapidly when Japan became a popular place to come and work for a year or so. Eikaiwas had a ready supply of new teachers waiting in the wings, so the teachers that were already employed became easily expendable. With that, salaries decreased along with working conditions, and there was little opportunity to complain and be heard. I recently noticed that the first school I worked at is now paying less than when I started 8 years ago. Private schools then realised this was the way to go and little would happen if they cut corners on things like labor laws, pensions, health insurance, etc. I was offered a job with a private school last year who wanted to pay me cash as my visa was due to expire. They said if anything happened they would say I was a volunteer. The teacher could get deported, but that didn’t matter as they had teachers queuing round the block. Then the Boards of Education decided to cut corners by working teachers full time but only giving part time contracts. I recently spoke to an employee at the Tokyo Board of Education who told me that all teachers are part time, paid only by the hour, and the pay hasn’t changed since 1994. Just to clarify, I said 1994!! The basic rate of pay with Chiba Board of Education is 340,000 JPY a month, for a direct hire part time (Mon – Fri 8.20am to 4pm) position, but you won’t get the twice-yearly bonuses that your Japanese contemporaries get and there’s no hope of a pay increase. Yet if you take the same job through a dispatch company you would be lucky to get 260,000 JPY a month. Dispatch companies cream off the top of your earnings and do all they can to avoid paying taxes and other expenses. Basically this is because the Boards of Education have washed their hands of all responsibility in hiring and firing staff, and couldn’t care what the dispatch companies do as long as there is a performing, upright standing, breathing native speaker in the classroom each morning. Japan is a quagmire of corruption.
If you have invested heavily in your education and added to that with some teaching certificates and now want to start earning a salary comparable to your local plumber, you would do best to avoid Japan. It is washed up, finished & corrupt. Coming here may get you into a financial situation you can’t get out of.
You are expendable.