For 600k they probably want a blonde with blue eyes
Will it be OK if I buy and wear some of those coloured contact lenses in bright blue?
Guy
damn Irish polish heritage really screwing me rn
But as After mentioned, some bleach and contacts and I’m good to go.
Getting back on topic, I’m now making about 8k NTD more a month than I was a decade ago and I have no idea whether that small negligible increase is due to factoring in the barest acknowledgment of inflation since then or the barest acknowledgment of me having slightly more seniority… but in any event I’m still getting screwed and probably more than I was even back then.
Same here. You actually took a paycut in real terms.
What sucks is when employers won’t even give the tiniest of raises but I know I’m getting screwed when the local restaurants keep upping their fees by 5nt here and 10nt there and eventually I have less and less money end of month.
They up the fees for the students all the time but not pass any of it along. Even 10nt an hour has them sucking their teeth. No trickle down economics in Taiwan.
That’s not even scratching it. Housing and utilities have skyrocketed since I came here a decade ago. But yeah, food costs as well. Just everything, big and small. Except salaries of course.
I miss that cheap living Taiwan. And they wonder why the birth rate is going to get much worse.
Is that seriously how much more you’re making, or is that some self deprecating hyperbole? Not busting balls, just don’t know the market at all. If serious, that’s f’in brutal.
What do you think?
Teacher salaries have barely budged.
My PA was online looking for a new job yesterday and she said that all the jobs she found were advertised for $600 per hour. I asked if that was for Taiwanese teachers or native speakers and she said native speakers.
If I recall correctly, the average rate has been at $600 for over 20 years.
So, if you work for the $600 pittance per hour and teach 22 hours per week, that’s $52,800K per month. That’s not too bad considering the average Taiwanese monthly salary for sitting in the office for 40 hours per week is between $33,000 and $45,000.
I know four women who are An-Ching teachers. They all work 8 hours per day, 12:00 noon until 8pm, and can’t leave early even if all the kids have gone home. They all make under $40K per month. Of course three of them live with their mommies and daddies, so they don’t have adult living expenses, so there’s that.
I guess the bottom line is the reason that English teaching rate has barely budged or not at all over the past 20 years is because the owners can always find some fresh off the boat foreigner to “teach” for the amout offered. English school bosses are not known for wanting to hire the most experienced and hard working teachers because they actually cost them money.
One of my Taiwanese friends who is an English T/A recently complained to the owner of the school regarding the incompetence, lack of preparedness and failure to cover the required material during classes of her foreign teacher. The boss told her that she needed to make up for his shortcomings as she couldn’t fire him because he’s a white foreigner and the school needs him. My friend would like to quit, but she says it’s like this all over. She and all the other T/As and An-Ching teachers have a lot of resentment towards the foreign teachers because they make so much money for doing so little and behave like they are the kings of the school.
Yeah well they could always look for another job , that is the choice we have. Or move to another country where being an Asian lady that speaks fluent Chinese gives them an advantage . If they didn’t move or look for another job that’s their decision at the end of the day.
And most of them don’t have good English so they can’t actually do what that foreign teacher is doing. If the boss or T/A want a better teacher the boss needs to offer more money. Which I guess is your point anyway.
Yeah, I’m pretty tired of the “blame the Waiguoren” game. It’s a losers’ game. If you’re angry, blame the system that exploits you, not the hapless foreigner also trying to make a living. The money I make as a uni instructor is still peanuts compared to the equivalent position in the US, but I’m not some “dancing white monkey” either. Went back to school to get my Masters, gotten papers published, spend hours every week preparing classes or grading students, and I’m not “king” of anything. We are given the worst timetable for our classes, take on the crap classes other Taiwanese instructors refuse to teach, and generally get excluded from the office culture as we never truly fit in. Tell your T/A friend to get bent, @MalcolmReynolds
These are private English schools, you know, the buxiban scene, not universities.
Some of my Phd pals who have teaching gigs at universities have other shitshow stories to tell about their experiences.
Life of a buxiban TA is rough. Years ago when I left a school, my TA would constantly complain about the teachers that came after me. Poor girl got yelled at by the school manager in front of everyone until she cried once.
I met very few native English speakers with university degrees who worked the cram schools, mostly Africans. There were a handful of Europeans with decent English, but most of the buxiban teachers I knew were SEA undergraduate students. They would accept less than 600 and the university took care of the ARC.
I was actually happy about this, looked pretty fake on the top and toxic underneath…
I’m an introvert (as you probably know) so it doesn’t bother me that much. But it does mean you get left out of consideration when a class is up for grabs and a Taiwanese colleague is given it over you just because they have better guanxi with the office staff. The students bash them on D-card, they have a crap and outdated approach to teaching, but they bought pineapple cakes to the fat admin girl who spends half her day loudly gossiping at her desk.
If you work at a university, or even a public school, your salary is supposed to go up by at least 1000, maybe up to 1500 per year of seniority. I find it hard to believe that your salary has increased so little in such time. I’m making 14,000 NT more per month than I was just two years ago. However, my ability to earn over time was essentially taken away from me, so I’m probably back to where I was about 3 years ago anyway…. About half of that 14k is an increase in my base salary (which is used to calculate my year end bonus) and the other half comes from some monthly bonus that I get now, which I have no idea what I get it for….. a lot of this shit is never explained to me.
How about labor supply? I mean, if you live in Taipei City, it’s pretty much saturated. I’ve heard about people living in Taipei and going all the way out to Taoyuan to find work, and of course people working multiple jobs, unless you can get a job at a uni, regular private school, or public school. Monthly salaries for public schools teachers are up, as well as for universities. I have no idea what it’s like at private schools, I imagine they have also had to increase their salaries as public school salaries are actually much more competitive now and those jobs require much less work and stress. For me personally, I’d be able to make around 95k a month at a public school, so dealing with a private school’s bullshit would require a minimum salary of 150k. I think I’ve heard people say around 100k is what many of them offer, but I would think that they’d have to offer at least 120k to be competitive given what one can now make at a public school…. or they just keep trying harder and harder to find suckers….. they’re born every minute, ya know?
As for buxiban teachers, are there really that many young people (just out of college and up to around 26 or so) coming to Taiwan any more for their first English teaching job, or spent a year somewhere shitty like China or Korea and looking for a change? It seems like their numbers have been dropping for the past decade or so, but maybe I’m just out of that circle entirely now. Or are they just going to places outside Taipei, because it’s so saturated here with people who have APRCs or spousal visas? I’ve heard it’s quite difficult to get a buxiban in the Taipei area to offer an ARC…. they just might not want to because they can get other foreigners who don’t need sponsorship, or there just aren’t enough hours to go around.
I switched universities at some point so maybe that set things back. That said, I’m pretty sure my salary didn’t change at all at my first university the first 3 or 4 years. I was not a professor but a project lecturer subject to annual contract renewal, so maybe that’s why it was locked in.