What should you do when you don't get paid for your English language job? (R)

Here's a clip from Evan's experience teaching English in Korea in the early 2000's. 

Full episode: 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2039972/episodes/11201567

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Transcript

Evan: 

Well, I didn't stop communicating completely. I stopped writing mass emails to huge groups of people and I just continued writing individual emails to people talking about things in our personal relationship. But I stopped doing these gigantic dispatches. And I didn't start a blog because I remember a few people told me I needed to start writing a blog about this. And I said I didn't want to do that because I didn't want it to be public. I didn't want, yeah, I know, that's funny now, but this is well past the expiration date, but I didn't want to be one of those people that was live blogging their experience because I didn't want, I wanted to have the freedom to just write about whatever I wanted to and I didn't want someone to stumble across it.

Steph:

Yeah, that was smart.

Evan: 

Thanks.

Steph:

Kind of wish I had gone that route. I have no regrets about what I said, but I probably should have gone anonymous and changed the city I was in. But, you know, live and learn.

Evan: 

Because that's actually funny because at the school that I worked at there in Korea, the person who ended up replacing me ended up having a very public blog and just trashing the school on the internet.

SPEAKER 3

Oh.

Evan: 

And she wasn't very smart about it because the head teacher just, you know, this was pre, well, no, it wasn't pre Google. It was right as Google was taking off. But he looked online and he found her blog and printed it off and said, Why are you talking about us this way in public that everyone can see?

Steph:

Oh my god.

Evan: 

And then she went, oh, I'm sorry about that. So then she switched her blog to private.

Steph:

Wow.

SPEAKER 3

Yeah.

Steph:

Okay, well I didn't do that. I didn't write about, I didn't bitch about work. I described work. That was the one smart choice I made. And I did anonymize people's names, but I generally tried to share my experience, not other people's experience. But yeah, that's not smart.

SPEAKER 3

No. Yeah. What?

Steph:

I have to plug whenever I can. Feels like there's something in the mass email experience that made you kind of generalize and go down a darker path. Am I making shit up or does that seem possible?

SPEAKER 3

No.

Evan: 

I always talk about, because I read this once about how there's two types of people, the people that do platonic ideas of like broad categories and the Aristotelian idea of like tiny little boxes. And I understand that even by bringing that up, it shows that I kind of do things in broad categories because I just mentioned two. But I'm one of those people that I see things in broad strokes. And so I didn't know, writing the mass email didn't make me go down this dark rabbit hole. I was in that dark rabbit hole where I saw things in just sweeping generalizations. Yeah, because my first job in South Korea, I thought I had this horrific job. I was working at this language school and I couldn't imagine anything being any worse. And then I met a bunch of other people who were teaching in language schools. And when I say I couldn't imagine anything worse, I mean as far as like the language school situation could be worse, there's infinitely worse situations on earth, I get that. But I thought that the language school job that I had was the worst possible job, language school teaching job you could have until I met a whole bunch of other language school teachers and we were all having Thanksgiving at a friend's house, and I noticed that everyone was telling the exact same story just with different details. And so I was like, oh, it's just like this. And so I was in this incredibly broad brush stereotype kind of mode where it was like, language schools and education here works like this. And so, yeah, no, it had nothing to do with the medium. I literally thought like that.

SPEAKER 3

Yeah.

Steph:

The first time I was in Taiwan, the first time I was around a bunch of TEFL teachers and they were bitching, I was like, yeah, me too, me too, me too. And they were talking about, and oh, and one person said, oh, do you ever get paid on time? And I went, oh, suddenly I like my job. What do you mean you have all of this and you're getting, your pay is being messed with and your benefits are being messed with and they haven't, like they haven't paid for your airfare. Like all the things that I thought were a given because I got very very spoiled with my North American and Taiwanese married couple bosses where they did what they said. And that was not the norm, apparently. I was like, oh.

Evan: 

No, I couldn't believe it when one of my friends at one point, I was complaining a little bit too long and he asked me, Do you get paid on time? And I said, yeah. And he goes, well, you have nothing to complain about then. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. As gently as I humanly can. the only reason why I show up for work is because you pay me. If you don't pay me, I don't show up. So if you're going to pay me late, I just, I'll come in late or I won't come in at all because you're not paying me. I never understood because like I actually had that with one of my first boss. She was like, all you care about is money. And I looked at her and I went, no, no, no.

SPEAKER 3

What?

Evan: 

You pay me because I work here.

Steph:

Why y'all here?

Evan: 

If you're not, just. Just stop. If you can't afford to pay me, that's fine. I'll go find someone who can.

Steph:

Yeah, there was a big chain up in Taiwan that, ah, there was a big chain school up in Taipei that notoriously didn't pay people, hired tons of people, went through teachers like crazy. Everybody knew on and offline that they did this, and yet they still were able to hire a lot of teachers. And when you met the teachers and they said the name of the school, you'd be like, But you didn't want to be the person to warn them because they just got there and they were really excited, but you're like, I feel like I should tell you. But if you met them like a few months in, they'd be like, yeah, well they said it would be next week or they're having a little problem with their finances and blah, blah, blah. Giant school making tons of money. And it just notoriously for years and years, it was weird. It was weird.

Evan: 

My first job, they didn't pay me on time three months in a row. And the last time I took the receipt from the ATM and I just showed it to them and I said, why didn't you pay me? And they said, We forgot. And I was like, As gently as I can, what would you do if I forgot to show up for work?

Steph:

Yeah.

Evan: 

I mean, I refused to, because I kept telling them, I'm like, you, want to tell me that you're having financial problems? You don't want to tell me you're so stupid, you just forgot to pay me.

SPEAKER 3

I know, right?

Evan: 

So what are you gonna... And then I said, Do you need me to remind you? And they said, yeah. And so I said, okay. And so I would remind them, the day before I was supposed to get paid every day, each month until I ended up leaving there.

SPEAKER 3

And.

Evan: 

I got paid late once at the public school because my new supervisor who had to submit my pay was new and she didn't realize she had to do it because I understand she had all sorts of new things she had to do. And so I got paid late once there and I just kind of laughed it off because I got paid late one day. And she was like, I am so sorry. I'm like, it's okay. She goes, it won't happen again. I know. It's all good. And it's just such. It was just such a difference. And I was just like, yeah, no big deal. And everything was fine.

SPEAKER 3

Yeah.

Steph:

I remember in Vietnam when the woman that did Finance went on maternity leave, and they didn't assign anybody to do her task, and we were all waiting for our paychecks. We're like, what's happening?

Evan: 

What's happening?

Steph:

All 100 teachers are like, oh, my God. I'm like, you guys had at least. Okay, maybe she didn't tell you the first two months. but she probably did. So you had at least, what, five, six months to plan this moment? Yeah, that was, that was, yeah.

SPEAKER 3

Yeah.

Steph:

As an avid planner, I, these moments hurt my head a little bit when they happen. What would you say to first year expats, especially the English teachers out there? How to deal with these kind of moments of just, What's happening? Instead of bitching to people online or in person at the bar, what could they do instead that might do might be better for them?

Evan: 

Detach. How? Just literally just detach. Just take a step back, breathe, and take a big picture view of the situation. and understand that it's not personal. They're not doing it to you. That this is just what is happening right now. And you need to figure out what you can do to make the best of this situation.

Steph:

Do you think that there's anything cathartic in writing stuff like this?

Evan: 

I kept a journal for the first, I think, year almost the first year I was in Korea and I just stopped because I would reread it and I realized that all I was doing was just spewing pure negativity. And I think that's because my expectations were off. And so if I would have viewed my journal as being something where I just like put down these feelings so I can just put them down and then not have to think about them anymore, I would have been in much better shape. But I was looking at my journal for wanting to see progression in how I was evolving while I was there. And I noticed that I was just, I was complaining about the same stuff every single day. So I just slammed it shut one day and I was like, no more, I'm not gonna write anymore.

Steph:

So writing it actually just kept you down in the negativity of it?

Evan: 

I don't think so. Someone very wise to me one time said that stress is what happens when reality doesn't meet your expectations.

Steph:

I bet they read that online.

Evan: 

Was that from Shakespeare again? Nothing comes from nothing. But the whole thing is that I was expecting this situation to be different than it was. And since my expectations weren't being met, it was driving me nuts. Like, for example, I remember you asking me once, How come I never said that Seoul was crowded? What happened was, as we were in Hong Kong, and you were like, It's really crowded here. And I go, yeah. And then you looked up and you saw that Seoul was actually more crowded than Hong Kong, more densely populated. You're like, why didn't you tell me that? And I was like, It's Asia. I expected it to be densely populated because growing up in Idaho, that's what you learn. Now, of course, I now know if you go to like Lao, you're not, you're going to have a very different experience. But point being is when reality doesn't meet your expectations, you do feel a lot of stress and it really bothers you. It never bothered me in Korea that it was crowded because I always expected it to be. You know, same thing. I was so upset that they weren't paying me on time because my base assumption is they're going to pay me on time. So it's just so to circle all the way back and answer your question, what can I tell first-year people? Try to have better expectations.