Sorry, I wasn’t talking about teaching, I was responding to @the_bear and the OP regarding company gigs.
I have no idea what it’s like for foreign teachers.
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I’ve never seen an office building or anywhere else in Taiwan that had hot water in public bathrooms.
Other than that, I reiterate my comment.
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BlockquoteTo which I now reply “If you go to America and flip burgers at McDonalds you will make nearly twice that if you’re at work the same number of hours you spend sitting around the school here”.
Yes, it’s a strange thing to be caught in between - from one side the salary seems outrageously low; from the other it’s seen to be unfairly high. 
Were you surprised by the reactions of the other teachers? The comments I got really caught me by surprise when I first got here because I had no idea the salaries here were so low. My peers in the US/UK don’t quite believe how little I’m getting paid… I think because Taiwan seems relatively developed, modern, etc. there is the assumption that the salaries are higher than they are.
I really relate to this. When I was in my 20s, I could accept it because I thought the pay was still good “for Taiwan” because of the relatively low cost of living. But I’ve since come to realise that the cost of living really isn’t that low after all.
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I heard on ICRT yesterday that the average monthly take home pay is 43k, but when bonuses are factored in it is 73k.
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More of that bullshit SinoMath.
Like when they say we get 4 days’ holiday but they’re counting the weekend.
Or they say (which they do) that the company gives “14 months’ bonus” at CNY but they really give 2 months’ extra pay.
For that to be true, they would have to be forking over 11 months’ extra pay at CNY.
Which nobody is.
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Yeah, it’s all highly suspicious. It’s weird, because they are pretty accurate and detailed when it comes to stats - except where their pay is concerned. It must be culturally ingrained to bullshit about how much money you have.
The important thing to remember about CNY bonus is that it’s entirely unregulated by Labour Law, it’s completely at the whim of the company.
The company is under no obligation whatsoever to give it out, even if it was cited as part of an initial offering at hiring.
Having said that, it’s so deeply ingrained in the work culture here, especially as a motivation for staff to endure 12 months of shit pay and crap working conditions, that the company would, in most cases, face a serious mutiny/personnel haemorrhage if they really were to stiff everyone. No matter how much they’d love to.
Having said THAT, I have personally experienced, and known others who have as well, situations where the company did stiff one employee at CNY, in cases where they were trying to get them to quit.
I believe it. At 43k, half of your salary is going to rent (and that’s in a small apartment) and you’d barely be able to make the mortgage payment if you owned. So how would so many families have cars and send their kids to cram school and still go on vacations, even if it’s to other places in Taiwan, if they were being paid that low? I will never understand the “I don’t make any money” competition that goes on here. Your salary might not be great, but why are you complaining about being poor when you clearly have quite the disposable income? And why are you blaming the foreign teacher that’s here on poverty wages because Taiwan insists on hiring us??
People in Taiwan are worse than farmers for lying about how much money they have.
So true. If I had a nickel for every broke-ass Taike driving a Benz…
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It’s all about face… For me, I’d rather drive a Japanese car.
Yep - always had some type of bonus scheme in my job in Taiwan, same story for all my friends who were also not in teaching jobs.
Initially I used to get quarterly bonuses then moved to half yearly then finally annual bonus, the amounts and calculations varied but it was a decent amount.
All in all, none of this is really a surprise, workplace ethics, career development, and incredible compensation isn’t what Taiwan is known for, so you end up accepting the reality of it as part of the deal when it comes to working there.
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This interests me. Why do you think this is the case? IME men do tend to get the higher paying gigs. Is it just because we are male? A woman offered me a 2k an hour gig, admittedly only 2 hours a month, but why do you think we get gigs like that and women don’t?
For one thing, I’ve applied at a handful of private schools in Taiwan. All of them offered me something around 60,000/month, insisting that’s the most they can pay me. But I know men who don’t even hold teaching licenses who make 75,000/month at those schools. I have a teaching license and professional working fluency in Chinese (and a certificate for ACTFL OPI and WPT advanced-high to satisfy the Taiwanese need for pretty sheets of paper)
Then we get to the MOE schools. I had two years of full time teaching experience before coming to Taiwan, but the school told me that didn’t count, I would have to start from year 1 on the pay scale. But I’ve met men working for MOE schools with ten-ish years of experience in non-traditional schools in random places around Asia (which don’t count for MOE pay raises— they’re explicit about traditional schools being the only thing they count) and a BA who are making 85,000/month, which is more than you would make with an MA and experience in a proper school. Then there are the men who got their undergraduate degrees from Liberty university, teaching licenses from the state of Florida, and masters in “using English to teach non speakers about the Bible” from unaccredited bible universities who are paid at the “masters + many years experience level”. I know their students. All they do is review with flash cards and have them read through the dialogue over and over again for the whole class. But even they get paid more than me
For private tutoring, I tell people my going rate is 1,000/hr for one on one, 1,200/ hr for two on one. (In the past I took what I could get at 600/hr for one on one, but I knew that was way too low, especially since there aren’t a lot of native English speakers near me.) I have never had someone take me up on that price. In fact, people basically tell me to go f*** myself when I offer that rate. But there is a guy I know who speaks no Chinese after a decade of living here who charges 800/student, 3 students in each class, and those same parents flock to his school so much that he kicks out students who don’t show up to class one time and still has a constant flow of incoming students.
These are all examples of it happening, but not your thoughts on why it’s happening. What happened when you raised these instances with your manager, demanding more pay?
Is it cultural sexism with, presumably, internalized sexism among Taiwanese women?
Are these guys getting that pay rate in your area ?
Are they doing the same hours?
Nationality ?
Ethnicity ?
Last two are big factors here, I was discriminated against because of my nationality, just part of that ‘industry’ here.
It’s n interesting topic deserving of its own thread (gender discrimination). In the Intl org I work for women are actively discriminated for now (and therefore against men with the same experience and qualifications ), men can’t say anything about it though or we could lose our jobs. It’s a weird one.
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The grandparents often pay for buxiban fees, so there’s a good chance of, ahem, traditional views when it comes to choosing a teacher. I have some experience of this and while you’re talking to the parents ama is calling the shots.
Is there also a chance that they’re just better negotiators than you are? I’m not being flippant, but I remember being mad when I first discovered that my pay was lower than all my peers, but then I realised it was just because I didn’t know how to negotiate my salary.