Hi Folks,
I’ve been in Taiwan just over a month now and I am still looking for work here. I am presently located in Taipei. I have a 90 landing visa starting from the 23rd of March 2010.
Yesterday, I was invited to an interview in the nearby city of Taoyuan to a school called David’s English Center. It’s part of a chain school with branches all over Taiwan, I understand. On the surface, it seemed like a good job as I would be teaching adults for which I have a lot of experience.
The first thing the woman, who interviewed me and who I presume is the manager of this local branch, said to me was that, by Taiwan law, the maximum number of hours a teacher can work at her school was 17 hours per week. I don’t know if she meant just her one school or all jobs combined. If she meant just her own school, isn’t that bullshit? I read some place the maximum number of hours a foreign teacher can work is something like 35 hours between all jobs?
I took an hour by train to reach this school. She offered no demo. Instead, she told me that I could come back again tomorrow morning and I could teach a 2 and a half hour class and get paid for it - however she had to make some phone calls. She annoyingly lacked specifics here. In hindsight, I think she was going to ring another teacher who would otherwise teach this morning 2 and a half hour class and ask him/her to forego his/her wages which, instead, are passed onto me. She told me she would ring me back later that evening to confirm. I think that’s dodgy. This sounds like a real mickey mouse set-up if you ask me. Surely, that’s illegal. I don’t have the ARC or work permit. I need a an Employer who will sponsor me for my ARC and work permit. I shouldn’t be working in a classroom in a, I presume, registered school, without these documents. So, I said no, despite the fact that she would pay me. She explained that, if I got this “demo” (and that’s how she represented it - a 2 and a half hour demo), I would get between 500 and 600 NTDs an hour depending on my experience. She was annoyingly short of specifics. She has my resumé!! She knows my level of experience as a teacher. Why couldn’t she tell me exactly how much I would make? Anyway, did I make a mistake refusing this work gig? Is it the case that, as is the case with Kindergartens, if I’m caught by the authorities I would be deported? Should I have done it?
The offered job was a pitiful joke, I have to say. She could only offer me 2 and a half hours per week. I understand for a school to sponsor a teacher for an ARC and work permit, you’d need to work at least 14 hours a week. She assured me that her school would sponsor an ARC and work permit for me but if the school was only offering me 2 and a half hours per week, I don’t see how that can be so.