There has been inflation in Taiwan in 23 out of the last 28 years ( indexmundi.com/taiwan/inflat … mer_prices.html ) . Prices have gone up.
What the heck are you talking about? I can see price differences from just a few ago and now, let alone 8 years ago.
A lot of this has to do with supply and demand. There are many teachers, and maybe not enough jobs for everyone, so employers take advantage of the situation. They know the game and they play it well. Never accept anything less than 600 an hour if you are working in a city setting. If you are in the country side, then in some cases it may be Ok, but usually the countryside is so desperate for teachers they will offer 650 or more an hour, and with cost of living in middle of nowhere Taiwan that’s hard to beat.
My GF is head foreign teacher at her school and works very close with the admin. The salaries they pay some of their teachers is ridiculous, yet they still come! The admin told my GF straight up, Americans and Canadians get this much for full time work, South Africans get this much. The work schedule is 9-6:30.
So thats a 9.5 hour working day. Within that time frame, your actual teaching hours are 7, 1.5 hours prep/office hours, and one hour for lunch (you can leave the school for lunch). What do you think is a fair wage for this? 42.5 working hours, 35 hours teaching a week. I’d want 85k a month minimum for this kind of work. That comes out to about 600 an hour, give or take a little depending on how many working days are in that month. Guess how much the South Africans are getting, 65k a month! Calculate the hourly wage for that, its like 450 an hour! Not only are the South Africans getting ripped, the Americans and Canadians at the branch are getting ripped in my opinion as well, they are getting more than the South Africans but still below the 600 an hour mark. And sad thing is there are many more resumes on file waiting for an opening.
As for cost of living, it isn’t as cheap as many people think. Sure the rent is cheaper than our home countries in most parts of Taiwan, but how about Taipei, I hear people paying 12-15k just to live in a shared apartment in a reasonable location. That’s the same you’d pay sharing an apt back in my home country. The only thing making cost of living cheaper here is not having to worry about maintaining a car, most of us get by on scooter and public transportation, and eating the local food everyday which is ridiculously cheap. If I did settle in Taiwan, buying a house, car, ect… I can see it costing just as much to get by here as it does back home. I’m sure glad I have no responsibilities right now haha.
65k a month ain’t bad. It’s also a hell of a lot better than zero. Why on earth would anyone want to work a such a job on a tropical island with colorful people and a very livable wage? It’s only a rip-off if one can easily get better at another school. It doesn’t sound like that’s the case right now.
Tried to fix that up for ya.
What the heck are you talking about? I can see price differences from just a few ago and now, let alone 8 years ago.[/quote]
Uhh, I assumed he was being ironic, given the rampant inflation in most areas in the last 2 years and the non-stop creeping inflation in others for the last 8 or 9.
Water heater/cooking propane has increased regularly in price pretty much bi-monthly for the last 5 or 6 years.
It’s roughly 50% more expensive than 4 years ago.
Petrol, as well, has gotten steadily more expensive in the last 6 or 7 years and is pretty much double what it was when I first got here.
Whilst per hour teaching rates are, at the very most, no more than 20% higher than they were at the same time.
Not that I teach, but even my last fulltime job, while the rate was good, didn’t raise my pay by as much as 10NT over the last 5 years I worked there, despite well-known, documented increases in the COL over the same period.
[quote=“valor”]A lot of this has to do with supply and demand. There are many teachers, and maybe not enough jobs for everyone, so employers take advantage of the situation. They know the game and they play it well. Never accept anything less than 600 an hour if you are working in a city setting. If you are in the country side, then in some cases it may be Ok, but usually the countryside is so desperate for teachers they will offer 650 or more an hour, and with cost of living in middle of nowhere Taiwan that’s hard to beat.
My GF is head foreign teacher at her school and works very close with the admin. The salaries they pay some of their teachers is ridiculous, yet they still come! The admin told my GF straight up, Americans and Canadians get this much for full time work, South Africans get this much. The work schedule is 9-6:30.
So thats a 9.5 hour working day. Within that time frame, your actual teaching hours are 7, 1.5 hours prep/office hours, and one hour for lunch (you can leave the school for lunch). What do you think is a fair wage for this? 42.5 working hours, 35 hours teaching a week. I’d want 85k a month minimum for this kind of work. That comes out to about 600 an hour, give or take a little depending on how many working days are in that month. Guess how much the South Africans are getting, 65k a month! Calculate the hourly wage for that, its like 450 an hour! Not only are the South Africans getting ripped, the Americans and Canadians at the branch are getting ripped in my opinion as well, they are getting more than the South Africans but still below the 600 an hour mark. And sad thing is there are many more resumes on file waiting for an opening.
As for cost of living, it isn’t as cheap as many people think. Sure the rent is cheaper than our home countries in most parts of Taiwan, but how about Taipei, I hear people paying 12-15k just to live in a shared apartment in a reasonable location. That’s the same you’d pay sharing an apt back in my home country. The only thing making cost of living cheaper here is not having to worry about maintaining a car, most of us get by on scooter and public transportation, and eating the local food everyday which is ridiculously cheap. If I did settle in Taiwan, buying a house, car, ect… I can see it costing just as much to get by here as it does back home. I’m sure glad I have no responsibilities right now haha.[/quote]
Is that a proper school, i.e. not a buxiban? They are getting ripped off. At our school, in our first year, we get about 66,000NT/month for about 14 hours of teaching per week. I get more because I’ve been here longer, though one reason (of a few) I am thinking of leaving at the end of this contract is that there is a huge opportunity cost involved. We have to be here for eight hours per day, even when we’re not teaching, so I forego the opportunity to work more hours and earn more. Anyway, there are plenty of teaching jobs here where someone can walk into at least 70,000NT/month.
Even with that in mind, as has been mentioned, there aren’t a lot of incentives to move to Taiwan as a qualified teacher. Most of the people we get (we have about 24 foreign teachers at our three schools, and there’s a fair turnover) seem to fit into one of three categories. They’re either right out of university (a very small number), retired and looking for something different (about half of the rest) or have some eccentricity or reason they don’t want to be in the West, such as a Taiwanese wife (the other half of the rest). For many women between the ages of 25 and 50, moving to Taiwan is not an option because they have kids or are seriously considering having them fairly soon. For many people, men or women, moving to Taiwan is also a step in the wrong direction for their careers. If you have any kind of additional qualifications such as ESL/EFL certification or a higher degree, why would you come to Taiwan? You don’t get paid extra in most places for having such things. My colleague is currently doing his Master’s, but he is largely doing it for personal reasons. The return on the investment is atrocious between the fees he has to pay and the opportunity cost of lost income over the couple of years it will take him to do it. As it stands, I won’t do any additional study for those reasons.
If Taiwan really wants to entice more qualified teachers to come here to teach, they’re going to have to radically increase the incentives. That would destroy the buxiban sector for one thing and it would really mean cracking down on kindergartens, neither of which will happen any time soon. Even in government jobs, they’d have to get rid of some (or maybe all) of the recruitment agencies who take a huge slice and whose interests aren’t aligned with the government/schools.
In terms of the private sector, at times, it does frustrate me that I get these clowns who contact me saying they’re really interested because they like my qualifications and experience, but who then balk at the idea of paying at least 1,000NT/hour. These days, I just shrug my shoulders. Whatever. If they can indeed get someone who is willing to accept 600NT/hour, then they’ll get what they pay for. I explain that to them and if they don’t like it, then I figure they’re probably not the sorts of people I want to be tutoring anyway. I have one friend who gets no less than 700NT/hour (it will soon go up to 750NT/hour) for any job (including kindergarten and buxibans). He’s here illegally, and he’s never even been to university. In some senses, it frustrates me, but again, if people are willing to go with that and pay him as much as they do, then that’s up to them. I want no part of it though.
One of my other friends is convinced that the writing is on the wall for foreign teachers here and that within 3-5 years in Taipei, rates will be incredibly low for foreigners because people will mainly use Taiwanese teachers anyway. Perhaps that may be the case at the low end of the market (and flushing out a few of these illiterates from third-world countries like Poland or South Africa might not be such a bad thing), but I can’t really ever see it happening at the higher end of the market. Any Taiwanese person who speaks English that well sure wouldn’t be in English teaching, which still leaves positions open for really good teachers, and I think there will still be enough demand for that, at least for people with the right qualifications and experience.
As for whether foreign English teachers get paid a lot compared to locals, that’s irrelevant. We don’t compare our earning capacity to that of the average Taiwanese person (or Taiwanese teacher). We compare it to how much we could be getting back in the West, or how much we could be getting teaching English elsewhere. At least, I don’t compare myself to the average Taiwanese person. I’ve travelled the world and don’t have any particular ties to any one place. I’ll go where the going is good. Furthermore, the average Taiwanese went to a shit university. On international scales, even universities I wouldn’t have dreamt of attending back home because they were so shitty rank above the best universities in this country. Why should any of us sell ourselves short by comparing ourselves to graduates of Taiwanese universities, many of whom are qualified in fields other than ESL/EFL also?
Now that pissed me off no end. It’s a simple matter of perusing the threads on forumosa to find out who the true “illiterates” are. They are not South African or Polish, Australian or British.
Now that pissed me off no end. It’s a simple matter of perusing the threads on forumosa to find out who the true “illiterates” are. They are not South African or Polish, Australian or British.[/quote]
If you’re a South African whose native language is English, then my apologies, but I’m sick of all the Afrikaans speakers (with their “What day will be tomorrow?” or “He go to the shop.” nonsense) slipping through the nets simply because technically, some people from their country are native speakers. If they’re not going to let people from the Philippines or India teach here, then they shouldn’t be letting South Africans teach here unless they can prove their first language is English. A quick look at the surnames would give somewhat of an indication.
Also, are you saying South Africa isn’t a third world country? Amongst other things, if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be so bloody many of them in everyone else’s country, from the U.K. to Australia to Taiwan. As has been mentioned, the Afrikaans speakers drive the wages (and reputation about how well we speak our own language) down for everyone else. They’re like Philippino maids masquerading as English teachers, only their English isn’t as good.
Now that pissed me off no end. It’s a simple matter of perusing the threads on forumosa to find out who the true “illiterates” are. They are not South African or Polish, Australian or British.[/quote]
If you’re a South African whose native language is English, then my apologies, but I’m sick of all the Afrikaans speakers (with their “What day will be tomorrow?” or “He go to the shop.” nonsense) slipping through the nets simply because technically, some people from their country are native speakers. If they’re not going to let people from the Philippines or India teach here, then they shouldn’t be letting South Africans teach here unless they can prove their first language is English. A quick look at the surnames would give somewhat of an indication.
Also, are you saying South Africa isn’t a third world country? Amongst other things, if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be so bloody many of them in everyone else’s country, from the U.K. to Australia to Taiwan. As has been mentioned, the Afrikaans speakers drive the wages (and reputation about how well we speak our own language) down for everyone else. They’re like Philippino maids masquerading as English teachers, only their English isn’t as good.[/quote]
Some of them do indeed have a strong accent and dubious grammar, but most actually speak decent English. Anyway, they speak it well enough to help kids throw a sticky ball on a white board, since most of them work in K.Gs.
It makes a lot of sence for school owners to hire them: they are caucasian, hard working and reliable. They seldom miss work (unlike “teachers” from other countries), and usually stay with the school for a long time (few opportunities for them here or in their own country). Some chain schools know that, and actually “specialize” in South Africans.
Some are Caucasian, some are not. Also, I assume that by Caucasian, you mean white, even though people whose ancestors came from the Indian subcontinent are also Caucasian. Anyway, it makes a lot of sense because they can pay them a lot less than people of other nationalities and they also know how desperate many of them are not to be in South Africa, and how hard it is to go to other places. That’s like music to a Taiwanese buxiban owner’s ears because it’s code for “I’ll put up with any amount of shit you give me and gratefully whore myself out”.