Posts by chris
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Polity: Refugees and aid - we’re laggards, in reply to Steve Barnes,
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Hard News: To have a home, in reply to TracyMac,
Yeah I saw that one, it certainly offers some perspective. I try to keep abreast of this kind of thing as every single job I had in China including here, this company, the company listed above, and, in fact all of them - were breaking some law or another. Be it localising (rigging) standardised international English qualification exams, falsifying compliance with (AQF), breaching visa laws and just generally up to no good. In fact it was my intent on moving back to New Zealand to get legal advice to see if I could chase up the local branch of EF for a breach of contract by a division of their country, but when you spend long enough in an environment where those kinds of conditions are the norm, in that kind of culture – the kowtowing, the submission – you lose a great deal of energy and enthusiasm for righteous conflict, much less if you’re born into it. So if my wife doesn’t wish to pursue the matter all I’m really amenable to doing is passing on your information, which -don’t get me wrong – is thoroughly appreciated.
I’m going to put down the issues at Education First, because they’re too big to fail and as the McDonald’s of the ESL world they should be doing better, and if I don’t put it down somewhere it’ll eat me up forever.
As I understand it, EF purchased their online teaching division sometime in the late naughties. On doing so they halved instructors’ pay to 10USD per hour resulting in a mass exodus of teachers. As part of the new recruitment wave this history was not revealed to us until about a year later when one of the old guard had an episode. There were a lot of episodes there. The job was cool, we could teach group lessons, private lessons, or correct writings at a rate of $9 for 9 articles. I only ever chose to teach group lessons.
Most fulfilling was never knowing who you were going to teach and the opportunity it offered to engage with people from all over the world, literally; Saudi Arabians, Brazilians, Pakistanis, Emaratis, Vietnamese, Japanese, Koreans, Chileans, Argentinians, Indonesians, Thais, Germans, French, Italians, Spaniards, Iraqis, Yemanese, Russians, Khazaks, Taiwanese, Malaysians, Mexicans, Equadorians. It was an opportunity to meet some truly amazing people and hear some details of fantastic life stories.
Teachers were required to write a minimum 80 word comment and grade every student within 24 hours of the class up to about 12 students. If there were technical issues preventing the instructor from teaching the onus was on the teacher to provide screen caps showing they entered the class on time. Teachers were graded by students and any teacher falling below the threshold would receive a warning threatening dismissal. This was problematic in that student encountering tech issues would invariably give low grades. The company employed me despite full knowledge that I did not have a Chinese work visa and that this was illegal, concerns about this were brushed aside based on the fact that for the most part we were working off US based servers and being paid from Switzerland.
In 2012 it was announced that teachers were no longer permitted to direct students to that marvelous resource of information that is the internet, from that point teachers were only permitted to direct to EF® branded course ware, if their ware didn’t cover the issue, as was invariably the case, then education was relegated to second place. In 2013 the rate for correcting writings was increased from $7 for 9 writings to $7 for 11.
Although private lesson students paid for a class whether they attended or not, in April 2014 it was decided that those teaching private lessons would no longer be paid if their students were a no show, regardless of the fact that the instructor had had to plan the lesson and set aside the hour, they would however be paid for the hour if they corrected 9 writings. In May 2014 it was decided that they would only be paid for the hour if they corrected 11 writings. In June 2014 there were no more articles left to correct so private lesson teachers weren’t paid for any class until the writings replenished. In July 2014 it was announced that private lesson teachers would be required to correct 13 writings in order to be paid for a student no show hour.
By mid-July 2014 the tone in the company’s internal forums had become so heated it makes something like this seem as jovial as a PAS word of the year thread, IRS investigations and strikes were on the cards.
In September 2014 changes were announced to the group lessons (which had remained untouched until that point). On the upside teachers would now be eligible to earn a bonus of $1 per hour if they could surpass a reasonably difficult student evaluation average score over a three month period, on the downside teachers would no longer be allocated classes as before. Rather than being paid $10 for turning up to teach or not teach as the case may be, teachers would instead have to log in to a waiting room 5 minutes before a class to queue up for the privilege of teaching. Classes would be allocated randomly from the hour (start time) up to 13 minutes past. Teachers would not know what class or level they were teaching until they arrived in the class with the students, they were kind enough to make a video about this here.
Under this new system private lesson teachers whose students didn’t show up would now be paid $4 for turning up and the full 10$ if they corrected 6 writings, if the cause of there being no student was a late cancellation they would be required to correct 10 writings in order to be paid for the class. In the case of a group lesson class not being allocated a teacher would be paid $3 for up to an18 minute wait, and paid for the full hour if they also corrected 7 writings. It was all beginning to feel a little like this, except that the job requires a bachelors degree and an ESL teaching certificate. Many of the employees are victims of redundancies filling in time until retirement.
On the internal forum I suggested that as writings could now only be corrected in lieu of class time, it did now appear to be in teachers’ interests to only take the $3 or $4 dollars for showing up, until such time as the writings built up to such an extent that the company would be forced to reconsider these new cutbacks. This was met with a prompt response from the 5th manager in 3 years in the form of an email informing me that EF’s legal department had just contacted him (on October 1st, National day, a public holiday) that they were not allowed to pay contract workers who are not on an EF sponsored visa in China and that my account would be terminated immediately (in breach of my zero hours contract which stipulated that termination by either party requires one months notice).
I contacted him a couple of times after this, both to inquire about honouring my contract and to inform him I was no longer based in China but I never heard back. Fortunately the technology has developed sufficiently that it’s now possible to do this type of work privately with only an internet connection.
So that’s what’s going on with EF, deep in their recesses. But yeah, everyone deserves a home and means of employment capable of generating sufficient self respect.
- Rated one of the top 10 best employers in China by Zhaopin.com
- EF is the Official Language Programme Supplier of the Rio 2016 Olympics -
Just as long as they’re not Chinese who are able to afford a house.
They decided to leave Xinjiang, he said, because they were tired of being harassed by Chinese authorities, who, he contended, targeted him simply because he was Muslim. “We need to live like humans, not like animals,” said Mohammed, 32, adding he was jailed for a month without reason and beaten. “I am a Muslim and I love the Koran. Let me live in freedom.”
He sold his business and his house and paid smugglers a total of about $37,000 to leave China.
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I would prefer we paid higher rates of taxation and provided better government services.
I’d reverse the sequence of those two suggestions. Apparently things are not going so well in Scandanavia (note: selective cherry picking throughout). If you’re convinced that the Government are capable of spending their current intake responsibly then it makes sense, if not then it’s good money after bad. When the priorities are skewed, more money will not equal better services, money is after all unaccountable.
In 2012 I went for an overnight stay in Hong Kong to renew a Chinese visa only to find that with less than 6 months left on my five year passport that could not be done. I went to the New Zealand consulate to pay cash, the online visa service only accepted cheque, credit card, and transfer. At the New Zealand consulate I admired their beautiful collection of New Zealand paintings. The staff told me that they would not accept cash and that I must send a money order, so I went out and made inquiries late on a Friday afternoon only to find that I wouldn’t be able to transfer funds without a local bank account and that I wouldn’t be able to apply for one of those because I wasn’t local. On Monday I went back and explained this to the staff at the consulate, again admiring their exquisite art collection, eventually they capitulated and deigned to accept my cash. 12 days after arriving for an overnight stay I was able to leave HongKong. Do I think that system could be streamlined without throwing extra money at it? Yes, and if they need extra money they could sell some paintings.
Closer to home and more closely related to health and education, I’m sure most of us have seen the advertisements for drug driving, some of them are quite amusing, storekeepers recount anecdotes of dazy shoppers, we have a laugh and then the omniscient camera tells us that not only might they be stoned on the fumes of the infamous cannabis plant but they also arrived in a motor vehicle and they are the driver. All the ads have the same focus. There are no coked up shoppers, no meth heads, no trippers, no junkies, no one’s boogying to the stoor ghetto blaster on e, it’s all about the weed, that may or may not have been smoked by the slow people who may or may not be driving. That’s some poorly spent money.
Have a scratch around and see if we can find some new crown limousines, MP pay rises, rebrandings of state services, forests of pamphlets destined to burn, flag referenda, sailing competitions, casino conference centres, flights, transport and hotels where Skype would suffice, art on walls, $11 million dollar apartments, $11 million dollar payments, cricket competitions, rugby competitions, rugby team announcements, $56,000,000 in annual rugby related injury ACC payouts, Police 10 7, Seven Sharp, golden handshakes, lifetime MP perks, international art exchanges, Six60, private prisons, charter schools, I see plenty of money.
Education, it’s an easy word to flip around the place, people talk about National Standards, about more science, about literacy and numeracy rates, but if we can’t instill worldly and humane values in our children, (primarily via social studies or its modern equivalent) before they reach their teens, then it’s unlikely that they’ll ever find a perspective that isn’t by and large centred around “me first”.
As per the idiom, I was disappointed that after 12 or so years of New Zealand’s free education system to find I had graduated still unable to fish, but in the bigger picture fishing is small potatoes. We emerge from school here largely ignorant. Until I went to China I had no idea what a true user pays health care system actually entails, sure we did a number of social studies projects on various countries; Japan, Holland as I recall. But we were never made to examine the stark contrasts between welfare states and those without. We drew a bunch of flags and tasted some food and cut out some pictures from travel brochures and it was a small world after all. How is that many of us can reach our teens in New Zealand without fully grasping what MJS achieved, without fully appreciating this legacy?
In China there is no state pension, welfare, health care is subsidised but if you don’t have cash on admission to hospital, you’re not getting treated, too often I saw groups gathered around bodies on the road, no one’s taking them to the hospital for fear of being lumped with the costs, there were a couple of reported cases of drivers reversing back over hit and run victims in order to avoid the need to pay hospital costs. My friend’s family, too poor to afford a stomach tumour were asked to provide a sheep corpse in lieu of payment, so they took the 48 hour drive from the far west of China to Beijing with the sheep corpse only to be informed that the tumour was inoperable midway through the surgery.
Some may say that these kinds of realities are too harsh to expose primary aged children to, and I’d totally agree if we hadn’t been fed a steady stream of brutal stories for an hour every Friday afternoon, from the horrors of WW1 to the failed Scott expedition we were inundated with gore, 100 year old gore. white peoples’ gore. Our children need to be presented with contrast and comparison, with history, with contemporary global realities in order to find perspective.
Some of us are fortunate enough to luck out with a hard left teacher who’s absolutely going to let the truth get in the way of a good story, I had one such teacher (not unlike andin actually, both in tone and perspective), but we can’t rely on our kids hitting gold indefinitely. We can’t gamble on the hope that a few teachers will instill a tangible sense of social justice and ignite the courage to confront it.
Education, when well administered, focuses on outcomes, not scaled results or scores or percentages. Outcomes which could justifiably focus on enhanced attitudes, confidence, empathy. Empowerment. Reading, writing, literacy and science are just the tip of the iceberg, I can read better than I can empathise, I can calculate better than I can recognise political spin. There are too many “well educated” arseholes in this world, and the saddest thing of all is that so many who gravitate to positions of power like bees to flowers* are of this ilk, and that people in positions of power are mutually inclined to give them that access and perpetuate this tradition of ignorance and waste.
Sheesh, long post, sorry about that.
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Hard News: To have a home, in reply to TracyMac,
Thanks for that help Tracy, I discussed these suggestions with her, but she’s not prepared to take those kinds of steps at this stage – that is despite her boss’s dad losing his temper at her twice today – as she said to me “you know my culture…”, but I’ll look into it. If she had as many job opportunities as she has avenues to resolve employment disputes we’d be sailing.
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Hard News: To have a home, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Thanks Sofie, obviously the risk of discussing this with someone in authority could be her ending up with no job at all, but yeah, once she finds something less demanding, though it’s hard to say how long that will take. Personally I was like “wow you’re earning minimum wage!”
- having worked for this company for three years at 10USD an hour. Obviously It’s trivial compared to what the refugees are facing, but heck isn’t this place on a downward trajectory or what.
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Speaker: Refugee fear-mongering must stop, in reply to Donna Miles-Mojab,
The decision to take part in the war in the Middle East obliges us to also take responsibility for the consequences of that war.
That reminds me of this quote:
If there’s any good news, it’s that no one will expect New Zealand to do anything in the foreseeable future. We ought to be glad of that
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Hard News: To have a home, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
but those risks are of a different order to the daily risks people face in refugee camps trying to avoid violence and get enough food, before they even start worrying about an education for their children.
Thanks Lucy, when you put it that way it becomes a very low brainer, my concerns are trivial by comparison, but this seems to be the thread to air them. Above DeepRed said:
Mr Key, being the son of a WW2 refugee, has basically “slammed the door behind him”
Looking long term, all things considered his family did immigrate here during the First National Government. which may have been a different beast at the time, but there hasn’t been an extreme shift since left or right since the Shipley administration.
My wife is a new migrant here this year, though by no stretch a refugee. She was lucky to have found a job here in May working for migrants who pay her minimum wage, she spends 9½ hour days per day on her feet, in an unheated workplace (even the customers complain), with no morning or afternoon tea break, a lunch break that only lasts as long as it takes her to eat her sandwich, no sick leave or holiday pay, a zero hour contract and it remains unclear whether income tax is being paid. On her first day the boss’s dad, who arrived here on a family reunification visa a few years ago took her aside and gave her a persuasively glowing speech about John Key and this National Government, replete with Maori bashing. This is New Zealand 2015. The hand that feeds.
As far as providing an education goes, John Key received his here.
The essential preliminary step is increasing the intake but the:
wrap-around service
as John Key puts it, clearly needs a great deal more work to ensure the same conversation threads aren’t again rearing their ugly heads 50 years from now. The fact that increasing the intake by such a negligible margin has been a bone of such contention for this Government is ample evidence that this “service” is dysfunctional. Welcome to New Zealand, we trust you will enjoy your Serco home and grow up to be like Mike or John or Bill or Judith or Nick or Gerry or Murray, your more than generous hosts, I shudder.
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Hard News: To have a home, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
“it’s not much, but it’s home”
That would be a good start. I'm definitely experiencing acute cognitive dissonance with regards to these issues.
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There are really no excuses for not doubling our quota.
At the very least.
