Thursday, February 24, 2011

Google "Is Chungdahm a Good School to Work At?"

This is very interesting.

Chungdahm recruiters are going to regret their school operators are allegedly trying to stiff the English teachers working for them: from now on, every time a recruitee thinking about coming overseas to teach googles "Is Chungdahm a good school?" this article will show up.

Kudos to Kangnam Labor Law Firm for taking up their case, and kudos to The Korea Times for helping the teachers find a voice.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/02/117_81897.html

And anybody who's getting stiffed by their school:

There ARE options. Don't walk away from a situation where you're getting screwed, because that just empowers a dishonest employer to try to screw the NEXT teacher who replaces you, even worse.

Seoul Global Center's Support Page
Kangnam Labor Law Firm (associated with the case linked above)


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

An LCI KIds' Club school a few years ago also tried the "freelancer" argument against the teachers and ended up paying back the pension funds that they thought they were not obligated to pay. Good to see that these guys are taking the right steps to get what they're entitled to.

Katherine said...

This just after I've secured a contract with CDI~! I will bookmark these links just in case.

My understanding with franchise hagwons, though, is that pretty much *everything* varies from location to location. (Though it's disheartening to see that this happened at an actual branch and not just some random franchise location.)

It's also sometimes hard to draw the line between what's actually abuse, and what's just regular work.

조안나 said...

My first time in Korea I almost took a job with CDI (That is Chungdahm, right?) but their two options for teaching that they offered me seemed strange to I wound up going with SLP which sounded much more normal. I've heard that people who work for CDI for a long time can get some pretty good pay and sweet hours, but when you first start out, you're stuck working all sorts of weird hours and sometimes without things like health insurance and housing. I duno if it's a good place or not, but the people I know who have worked there were happy enough....

Eugene said...

I worked at CDI, and while I never had a contract with them, I don't really recall anyone ever complaining about their salary, their living conditions, etc. Some people complained about their hours, but it was usually because they wanted the weekends off, or they didn't want to come in on a weekday if they only had one three hour block to teach.

I think that CDI definitely does kind of trick people though, as that whole training session is meant to scare the teachers into accepting whatever contract they get.

You're forced to pay for your flight over, then go through training. At training they try to scare the fuck out of you by pretending that it's gonna be really hard to pass. They tell you if you fail and don't get the job, then they won't pay for your flight back, and the only way you will see that money is if you complete your contract.

Naturally, everyone there takes the first contract they get. I felt somewhat lucky that when I went through training, I already had been working there for half a year, and didn't have to worry about their bullshit.

I did get pissed that they didn't pay me for sitting through a training session that i didn't even need.

I'll have to pay attention to this judgement and if they win pay for training... I am gonna have to pay chungdahm a visit...