違法 Illegal working conditions of ALTs

The last six months, I’ve been a shoulder to cry on and source of information for some young foreign teachers who have been hired by dispatch companies to work in public elementary and junior high schools in the Chibaraki area.

The conditions that they live and work under are shocking. The dispatch company helped the teachers find accommodation, btu for the most part, the apartment rentals the company set them up with eat up close to half of their net pay.  I did some research on affordable rented apartments and found apartments in the same area for half the rent.

It got worse. Some of them were not paid their full salary. The contract stipulates that they were to be paid once a month on a specified date, and sometimes they were paid late or incompletely. They do not receive the same salary every month – if there is a holiday, their salary is reduced even though the contract school board pays the same fee monthly to the dispatch company. The agreement also stipulated that transporation fees would be paid, but the company failed to compensate the workers, and in the summer, told the employees they were going to change the contract, and transportation would be partially paid. The stress on the employees was too much and some quit.

I was shocked when I learned that some of the employees had gone to the schools and the school board to complain. Under the labour rules, the contracting company must give and receive communication to the employer, not the contracting school. Now, they had the employees so frustrated that they were breaking the law in order to get some straight answers and expose the dispatcher’s failure to pay.

I helped fuel the fire, I suppose, by advising the employees  and providing them with lots of ammo – labour and contract law information in English, labour union contacts, and labour relations offices in their areas. I told them to take it to the media, too. The thing is, these employees were scrambling to survive and formulate exit plans. They did not have the time or resources to expose this incompetent dispatcher. 

This problem with unregulated, illegal dispatching of foreign employees to work in public and private schools is chronic here, and the Japanese media is just beginning to pick it up.

I know, you might wonder, why do I call the ALTs employees? First, there are no regulations from the Ministry of Education (MEXT) to require these employees to be actual teachers. It’s true that some are qualified, licensed teachers from home, or have post-graduate degrees or recognized TESOL diplomas or certifications. But these teachers are the exception, not the rule. At a junior high parent-teacher meeting some years ago, I met parents who did not realize the foreigners in the classroom were not qualified or licensed, and they were quite angry about this situation. Often the school teachers who work with ALTs don’t know anything about the selection process for the ALT jobs.

Even the term ALT is not descriptive of the job performed by these foreign teachers. When I was hired by a dispatch company to work in a Chiba junior high school, I agreed on a contract which described my job as ALT work – assisting a Japanese teacher. When I arrived in Tokyo, I was assigned to be the primary teacher for an entire section of the school. I was essentially responsible for everything in my classroom, and the dispatch company continued to describe my job as (and paying me the salary of) an ALT.  I left after a few months because of a wage dispute, and later learned that the school had three different ALTs in only one year, mostly due to conflicts between the foreign employees and the dispatch company.

No regulation on either end hurts the foreign employees, the students, the teachers and the quality of education in the schools.

Finally Nippon Television (NTV) has exposed the conditions, often illegal, under which ALTs and other foreign English teachers work. Japan Probe did a great job of providing subtitles on these videos.

In the story, you will see a foreign English teacher in Musashino City, Chiba Prefecture, and another from Osaka City. The NTV story does an awesome job of exposing the failings of the Ministry, the dirty practices that hurt the teachers, viable solutions to the problem (direct hires), and the most important part of this situation - the impressions of the children who receive English education from foreign teachers.