Man Man Zou

Teachers in Taiwan work either full-time, or part-time. There is a big difference between the two, pay-wise.

At my school, and many others, full-time teachers get paid 56000nt per month (around $2200cdn). That’s for coming to school from 8:40-12:00, and then 2-4:30. 5.8 hours a day. If you work 21 days in a month, which is around the average, that works out to 450nt ($17cdn) an hour. There is also a lot of extra time not included in that number, such as parent meetings once a month, field trips, and that awful Saturday activity once a semester.

The part time teachers, like myself, get paid 600nt ($23cdn) an hour. When we come in for extra activities, we get paid for it (after asking for it privately from the boss, of course). I work a nice non-stop shift, from 1:40pm-6pm, only four days a week, and on a good month, I make almost as much money as the slaves who work from 8:40-4:30, five days a week (on average, it’s around 5000nt less than full-time pay).

The only advantage that full-timers have over part-timers is a week paid Chinese New Year holiday, but I’ve even seen the school scam teachers out of that if they haven’t been working there long enough.

So, the reason why I’m writing this is because today my friend had a really crappy thing happen to her at school (I would say it takes the cake for crappy things that my school has done, but I think it’s tied in first place with several other big catastrophes).

For the last 8 months, she’s been a part-time teacher at my school. They asked her if she wanted to teach summer camp in the afternoon, and she agreed to it. Now she has been teaching mornings and afternoons since the beginning of July.

Yesterday, the school sent home the kids who showed up at school because there were so few, and the weather was still terrible. They asked all the full-time teachers to stay behind at school (even though there was nothing for the teachers to do, the school likes keep all their prisoners at bay). Since she’s a part-time teacher, my friend thought she could go home… This was when the school finally decided to inform her that she’s now a full-time teacher, and no longer a part-time teacher for these two months of the summer.

So she’s been working for these 20 days at a much lower pay than she expected. The school just cut her pay without telling her. I don’t know how they can do this and get away with it.

Don’t think she should have known this would happen. Our school is one of the worst I’ve seen for communication. They don’t tell us anything, so many are clueless about things we are entitled to or not entitled to. How would someone know that if they get more hours added to their schedule, that they’re going to get paid less by the hour?? There are 12 or so foreigners working at my school and we’re all on a different contract, which doesn’t help the confusion.

What the school did was awful. I hope that the least she can get out of it is 600nt an hour pay up until yesterday, when they finally told her. The funny thing is that if the school had just asked her about this back in June, she probably would have agreed anyway. It’s just nice to know about these things before you see your pay stub with a devastatingly low number on it. Bastards.

The only reason this didn’t surprise me is because in the past, the school has sneakily offered Mark and I morning work, hoping we wouldn’t ask about pay. But I asked, and then declined the offer because full-time sucks.

Before I finish this journal entry, I want to give a quick run-down on the big differences between contracts at my school. Some full and part-time teachers get taxed 4%, some 10%. Some full-time teachers have Tuesday afternoons off, some don’t. Some part-time teachers have music and gym classes included in their pay, some don’t. Some full and part-time teachers have paid vacation, or bonuses, or a birthday holiday. Some full-time teachers have several paid sick days, some don’t. The advantages are not based on experience or bargaining abilities, they are based on disorganization between all the bosses who make the decisions. Just one of the many reasons why I’m happy to be leaving my school.