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I've been here for a month and I'm gearing up for a battle royale against my school's director, Mrs. Kim. From what I can tell, this is a rather common occurrance in Korea: because foreigners get paid handsomely, directors often look for a way to skim their pay with bloated taxes, fake cuts and outright lies. Most English teachers are isolated and culture-shocked and just fold sideways when it comes to pay. Lots of people get ripped off on severance pay, on the promised flight home, on apartment repairs, on holidays. They shrug their shoulders and concede just about everything to their director's 'expertise'. This is not the way of the Shetland Pony, my friends. I will fight these devilish Koreans in the mountains, in the tunnels and in the boardroom.

Consider the following:

2 million won.

minus 200 000 won for housing insurance (600 000 overall is taken off in monthly installments to ensure people don't cut and run on their utility bills. It's refunded at the end of the year, although I know of a couple people who forgot about it and didn't get their cash back).

minus ~5% tax: 100 000 won.

Should be about 1.7 mil, right? I pay my utilities and internet and phone bills seperately from the school, although many hagwons lump all that into the pay process (which makes things even more confusing).

The reason I anticipate fist-shaking and soforth is primarily Mrs. Kim's reported habit of deducting pay for 3 "training" days. Let me just tell you now, there is no "training" at Herald Kids School. Training is arriving at the school and getting tossed into the classroom by yourself for a mind-blowing trial by fire. Training is running around like a fucking madman, looking for the red books (NOT the fuscia books!!) because the goat-faced children are waiting to be taught. Training feels like a day-long act of unpleasant sodomy. I don't know about you guys, but back home I damn well expect to be paid for a vigorously sodorific afternoon.

Anyways - long story short - the raping comes for free. My payday got pushed back a couple days on account of this "training." This I accept, for it has been accepted by my forefathers and their forefathers before them, and the cardinal rule of teaching ESL is "bend or you'll break." Nothing runs exactly to the letter and a written contract is virtually worthless when you get right down to it. Working in Korea is an endless process of negotiation, of favours and fluffing. If things at the school don't go your way, who the fuck are you gonna go complain to?? It's sorta like being the token minority character on a reality TV show.

But this token minority will not be raped twice! If my pay gets scraped for these so-called training days, it'll be a repeat offence: I'll lose three days for having the pay period pushed back (meaning I worked three for free), and then three more if my salary gets pillaged as well. That's six days, bitches! This doesn't add up. This isn't right at all.

And so I'm waiting, pondering, anticipating, till Friday. I've got a gun and a pack of sandwiches.

Posted by Chris at 09:06 AM >> Commentations (5)