Let's Japan.org Debunking Eikaiwa and Ramblings in Japan

It doesn't look like the lawsuit will end any time soon:

The current focus of negotiations is the amount of notice union members should give the company ahead of industrial action. Initially, Berlitz Japan offered to drop their lawsuit if teachers gave a week's notice before striking. Begunto proposed five minutes. Since teachers typically only learn the next day's schedule the night before, the judge instructed the company to come up with a better offer.

Asked how much notice unions legally have to give before striking, Langley replied, "None. Zero. That's one of the beauties of a strike: You just strike."

In the latest round of talks held Thursday, Berlitz Japan requested contract teachers give strike notification by 3 p.m. the day before, and per-lesson teachers by 5 p.m. Begunto pointed out to the judge that per-lesson teachers don't receive their schedule until 6 p.m. the day before. Union executives have taken the offer back to members for consideration

That's quite the chutzpah from Berlitz. I don't know why they want advance notice of industrial reaction when it hasn't stopped them from screwing over their teachers:

One, who didn't want to be named, received word of his dismissal just before shipping out to Afghanistan as a U.S. Army reservist at the end of July 2009. Berlitz Japan had allowed the teacher to take unpaid leave for military duty several times before the strike. But after being the only teacher at his Yokohama branch to walk out, he began getting complaints from students.

According to Begunto members, after being ordered to deploy to Afghanistan, Berlitz Japan told the teacher he could take a leave of absence of less than a year, and that he'd have to quit if he needed more than a year. Two days before he left for Afghanistan the company fired him. According to the dismissal letter, his performance was subpar and was hurting the company's image.

Take unpaid leave and then get summarily fired anyway for reasons which you cannot defend since you are conveniently unable to communicate with the company. The same thing applies if you become seriously ill:

Another of the teachers named in the suit, Catherine Campbell, was fired earlier this month after taking too long to recover from late-stage breast cancer cancer [sic]. In June 2009, Campbell took a year of unpaid leave to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Because Berlitz Japan failed to enroll Campbell in the shakai hoken health insurance scheme, she was unable to receive the two-thirds wage coverage it provides and had to live with her parents in Canada during treatment. The company denied Campbell's request to extend her leave from June to Sept. 2010 and fired her for failing to return to work.

Berlitz Japan work rules allow for leave-of-absence extensions where the company deems it necessary.

Never mind that this is unpaid leave, it's Catherine's fault for not healing faster. Her situation is also a good example of why it's important to pay into a health insurance scheme. She would not have been financially crippled had she been enrolled in the company's shakai hoken health insurance plan. Insurance is always a waste of money until you need it, eh?

As the article points out, the heart of the dispute is a battle for a wage increase. The teachers went on strike for a 4.6% increase after going without a raise for 16 years while Berlitz and its parent company, Benesse, enjoyed record profits.

One of the reasons why conditions are so bad in eikaiwa is because the schools have been allowed to get away with their shady practices and abuse for so long. Part of it has to do with the lack of regulation of the industry, but another reason is that few teachers have chosen to stand up to their employers. It's always been easier to jump ship and find something better. But with Japan's moribund economy, those days are over. There are few good options left for teachers: 1) Don't teach English in Japan (don't bother with it in the first place) or 2) Don't be a pushover in the first place.

As I've said before, this is worth fighting for. You can't let yourself be pushed around. The alternative is to let eikaiwa schools forever stomp on you.

In other news, Louis Carlet is the executive president of Zenkoku Ippan (Tozen):

On Dec. 3, 2008, Berlitz Japan claimed the strike was illegal and sued for a total of ¥110 million in damages. Named in the suit were the five teachers volunteering as Begunto executives, as well as two union officials: the president of the National Union of General Workers Tokyo Nambu, Yujiro Hiraga , and Carlet, former NUGW case officer for Begunto and currently executive president of Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union (Tozen).

Hoofin' has the details on how that happened.

UPDATE: The author of the article, James McCrostie, was kind enough to email me and offer a few extra morsels that didn't make the editor's cut:

• To add insult to Catherine Campbell's fight with cancer, Benesse supports the Pink Ribbon campaign through their health insurance union （ベネッセ健康保険組合） [PDF, see p.3].

• Union members told James McCrostie in an interview that the fight against Begunto really seems to be part of a wider policy of union busting at Benesse Corp. In April, Simul International fired the president of their union, someone with 12 years experience at the company. Also, Berlitz threw away 15 years of established practices for collective bargaining in English. Two lawyers from the law firm suing the Berlitz teachers now run Berlitz's side of negotiations in Japanese and demand the union provide an interpreter. During negotiations, Berlitz managers ask the lawyers for permission before they speak. The law firm in question is famous in Japanese legal circles for union busting.

Stay classy, Berlitz.

UPDATE 7/27: Something just didn't sit right with me after re-reading the article and it's the union's case with the Army Reservist. It's a weak case, especially when it looks like Berlitz was being reasonable in granting several unpaid leaves. Expecting to be able to take multiple unpaid leaves and still keep your job is a stretch in Japan. It's also difficult to see how the union could pin his dismissal on him being the only one in his school to strike. It seems like a moot point to argue when all Berlitz has to do is point out that the teacher has been away from work for extended periods of time.

Yesterday's Have Your Say column in the Japan Times carried a reply to Richard Smart's article on eikaiwa being on the ropes. The author of the letter suggests that the media have not been reporting on the problems with the G.communication takeover of GEOS.

I have to disagree with this. From a strictly business point of view, the bankruptcy and take over of GEOS has been quite smooth, but the media haven't ignored the hard luck stories of teachers and students. When GEOS filed for bankruptcy, these were the first things they reported because it's the low-hanging fruit of the story.

But that's not the other side of the GEOS story the author has in mind. He wants the world to know about how bad G.communication is on the inside:

I had been employed with Geos for more than 10 years when they declared bankruptcy in April. I had given the required four months' notice and was due to leave the company in May, but had offered to extend my employment to help the school as they were having trouble finding teachers.

As I was on a very old-style contract, I was due a leaving allowance of ¥1 million — which I lost — in addition to April's salary. I have also had to fight to be allowed to stay in my apartment until the end of the month, despite the fact I had paid May's rent directly to the landlord.

[...]

In the school where I used to teach, the instructor who replaced me left after only a few days' teaching, and the other teacher is due to work until only the end of May. However, the students are not being told about this when they sign and agree to continue their lessons, losing the right to a refund if they cancel their contracts. Students who do not want to continue under these conditions are being told that they will not be able to obtain a refund.

Giving GEOS more than the 10 best years of your life, losing out on over 1 million yen, and fighting to stay in your apartment is a tough shit sandwich to have to bite into, but I have news for this person: take a number and get in line, pal. Your story isn't new. As has been documented here countless times, this is standard operating procedure for eikaiwa.

Where to begin? Crappy working conditions, low pay, illegal contracts, no benefits, pressure sales tactics, and outright fraud have all been reported in the Japanese and English press for years. I'd say it's a well-known fact. The author of the letter has been in eikaiwa for over 10 years and is worried about G.communication? It's time to clue in. Did he miss the way they handled the collapse of Nova when they offered all teachers a job only to break that promise on Christmas Eve?

Instead of complaining about the shady practices of G.communication, it's time to start practicing risk avoidance. Big changes are happening in eikaiwa right now and teaching English isn't the easy or stable gig it once was. The important lesson here is that the kind of loyalty shown by the author is wasted on eikaiwa. Always look after yourself first. Schools may sell a sweet-smelling line of bullshit about being a cultural ambassador or being a professional at all times, but you'd have to willfully ignore the fact that your school is small and dumpy, cut corners on expenses where ever it can, demands you help sell contracts and teaching materials, and probably lacks a manager for long stretches of time to believe any of it.

All you owe your school is an honest day's work. Signing a dodgy contract just to keep a roof over your head and money in a your wallet is a bad strategy for thriving in a foreign country. Don't fall into this trap. Building up substantial savings on an eikaiwa salary isn't easy, but you need cash on hand if you want to avoid the situation the author finds himself in. I wonder how many teachers are one missed or delayed paycheck away from living in a park?

Tuesday's Lifeline column in The Japan Times featured a situation that illustrated just how fly-by-night teaching English in Japan can be:

Reader TS writes: "I return to the U.S. next week and I was supposed to receive my final pay check from a really bad ALT company . . . last week, but did not receive payment. I've called them but the secretaries say that the people in charge are not in the office. I called my direct contact and he has yet to call me back.

"I've read on the Internet that with your last pay check this company will try and avoid paying you since the pay date is so close to when you have to return to your home country, and that when you return they will try and avoid all contact with you. I'm going to keep calling them, but somehow I worry that it is futile."

The article goes on to explain the hoops you have to jump through to get paid: send a letter through registered mail and wait for a reply. If that doesn't work, the next step is to go to a Labor Standards Office and have them call your employer on your behalf. Barring that, you may then need to hire a lawyer.

One crucial piece of information missing from the article is the name of the "really bad ALT company." While knowing what your options are when it comes to making sure you get paid is inportant, an ounce of prevention--knowing who the shyster schools are so you can avoid them--would save teachers a lot of grief. Fortunately, I'm told by a reader that the offending school is Japan Advanced Labour Staff Services (JALSS). You can read about them here and here.

Using the poor economy as an excuse to not pay staff is no excuse at all. The fact that non-payment appears to be common in eikaiwa should send teachers, prospective and veteran alike, running for the door. The moral of the story is this: If you quit your job, don't make any plans to immediately return home if you want to see your final paycheck.

Adamu at MutantFrog has taken the time to graph the numbers for the foreigner language market in Japan. If you've been following developments, you know that the numbers are bad. That said, he has an optimistic take on what's in store in for eikaiwa.

Paradoxically, this sort of downsizing is exactly what the industry needs, but when schools collapse so suddenly and spectacularly it scares people away and hurts business even more. Nevertheless, I would not be so intensely pessimistic as some of the commenters I have read. The initial success of these schools has created the “eikaiwa paradigm” that will live on, I think, even if all the big chain schools fall to the wayside. Just as small-time piano teachers can make good money anywhere in the world, any halfway decent teacher who can reliably provide value for his/her services can do OK. Maybe not “tens of thousands of western immigrants descend on Japan” kind of OK, but OK nonetheless. Japanese people still want to learn English and are willing to pay for it. They just can’t afford it as much anymore and don’t want to hand their money to crooks.

The problem is that these major players set up large-scale businesses that profited by essentially gouging customers – promising stellar results and pressuring them into long-term contracts only to give sub-standard lessons to people who may not have really been able to benefit from them in the first place. Now, a combination of factors – tighter laws, the bad economy, rise of the Internet as a study tool, people generally getting wise to the con – has come crashing down on Geos.What the numbers don’t show is that the major operators seem to be offering more or less the same product as before – if anything, they are diluting the product with less value and more part-time teachers – and customers just aren’t as interested anymore.

Can't say I disagree. Read the rest of the article and download the Excel file he used for the graphs.

Whoever wrote The ALT Scam on the Fukuoka General Union blog is probably feeling vindicated right now. The Mainichi Daily News reports:

Public schools here [Kashiwa, Chiba] have been unable to start their native speaker-taught English classes this school year after the city's board of education was accused of violating labor laws with foreign language teachers.

According to the Kashiwa Municipal Board of Education, it has been instructed by the local labor office to change its labor relationship with foreign assistant language teachers (ALTs) in the city's elementary and junior high schools after it engaged in illegal employment practices.

The local education board entrusted part of its English curriculum for primary and secondary school students to a Tokyo-based staffing agency between 2007 and 2009, and a total of 23 foreign teachers belonging to the agency worked as ALTs at 61 local public elementary and junior high schools during this period. Their contracts expired at the end of last month.

The article goes on to say that instructors were working as temporary employees under the guise of subcontractors, and demanding that their contracts be extended. When they complained to the labour board, the board investigated and found that the instructors were under the direct supervision of the schools they worked at even though they were working under dispatch contracts. The problem with this kind of arrangement is that:

Under the current law, companies and other business operators must offer a direct contract to their temporary workers after they have completed the first three years of work. Moreover, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare's labor guidelines require a minimum three-month interval before the two parties enter into another temporary contract.

The city's board of education had planned to terminate its English class teacher outsourcing contract and employ temporary English teachers directly starting this April. However, as the labor office judged that the education board had already forced its contracted foreign teachers to work as normal temporary staff, it became impossible for the city to renew the contracts right away, in accordance with the ministry guidelines prohibiting consecutive temporary contracts of over three years.

The BOE has announced that it will comply with the labour board's order, although English classes have been suspended until July. This is a good first step in breaking what I called "the terrible triangle" in ALT teaching jobs. The complaints to labour boards are having an effect.

If you haven't heard by now, the Immigration Bureau has officially deleted Guideline 8 and replaced it with:

"In order to promote signing up for social insurance, we will ask (foreign residents) to present their health insurance card starting April 1. We will not reject renewal or change of visa status for failing to present the card."

In other words, if you aren't enrolled in shakai hoken or kokumin kenko hoken when you go to renew your visa this year, your application will not be refused nor will they try and boot you out of the country.

The headline to The Japan Times article--Foreigners get nod to skip social insurance-- is misleading because the deletion of Guideline 8 has nothing to do with being able to opt out of social insurance. While the Free Choice Foundation is celebrating this as a victory, the law of land still obligates you to enroll in a national health insurance plan. While you'll get your visa, Immigration is still going to ask to see your health insurance card anyway.

For more, Hoofin has been all over this issue (and Ronald Kessler's case) and his latest is worth a read.

Good news if you're worried about the possibility of your visa renewal being denied due to your lack of national health insurance coverage:

The Immigration Bureau is planning to change a new guideline for foreign residents to ease concerns that those without social insurance will be forced to choose between losing their visa and entering the insurance system, a bureau official said Monday.

[...]

"The bureau will delete item No. 8 by the end of March, and 'lightly mention' the need to present a health insurance card in the introductory passage of the guideline," Immigration Bureau spokesman Yoshikazu Iimura told The Japan Times. "The wording will be in a manner to eliminate foreign residents' concerns that their visas won't be renewed if they don't have insurance."

So now the Immigration Bureau will "lightly mention" that you should be
enrolled in shakai hoken or kokumin kenko hoken. Curiously, the article passes off the change as a victory:

Foreigners and their supporters have protested the new
guideline as an infringement on freedom of choice.

Back in September, The Japan Times interviewed Susumu Ikegami, a spokesman for Geos, and asked him about the eikaiwa market. To no surprise, he said business was down but for some reason could not explain why.

Four months later, this article, and the rumours swirling about the health of the company, have apparently prompted Geos to take action so to speak. What better forum to set the record straight than a puff piece in the ELT Gazette? A reader informs me that Geos "fights back" in the January issue in an article titled "GEOS rebuts crisis claims" (requires free registration to read the article).

Here's a sample of the spin that will leave you dizzy:

Geos Teaching Ltd’s human resources director Chad Lafferty, based in Japan, said, ‘Opening and closing locations is a normal part of business… The global recession has certainly impacted the way we do business, but it would be wrong to say that any closures or restructuring of the company are directly related to the recession.’

[...]

The push for better sales results is alleged to have blurred the line between sales and teaching. One former teacher, who asked not to be named, felt ‘let down by management’ and identified ‘sales skills required by teachers’ as one reason why Geos was not ‘a school a teacher could stay in for long’.

In response, Mr Lafferty stated that ‘all employees are told at the time of being hired that sales is a part of the job. They are also told that they should never make a recommendation that isn’t in the student’s best interest.’ He added, ‘The sales pressure on teachers hasn’t really increased or decreased in the past few years.’

One former Geos teacher claimed that her manager asked her to call students six months before course completion to get them to renew their contracts, and that when the company found out she was leaving, she was asked to tell students that their next teacher would be ‘good’ and to encourage them to stay.

Lafferty responded that he was ‘not aware of any teacher who has phoned a student to try and get them to renew their contracts. In fact, I’d be very strongly opposed to the idea.’ Lafferty added, ‘There is no directive from Geos saying, “You must tell your students the new teacher will be good.”’

I don't know how this quells any rumours about the health of the company or portrays Geos in a favorable manner. Lafferty didn't flat out lie in the interview, but he didn't tell the complete truth, either.

It's true that Geos tells its teachers that sales is part of the job, but he fails to say that it is a significant part of the job. It's the part of the job that reduces managers to tears and causes them to quit when they can't meet their sales targets. It is the source of angry faxes demanding that schools sell more and sign up or renew students. It's the reason why students avoid making eye contact with managers because they know if the manager nabs them, talk will inevitably be about buying more lessons.

The "there is no directive that says you must tell your students the new teacher will be good" are the words of a drone. "Yes sir! No, sir! Three bags full sir! Sell! Sell! Sell for the company!" Poor Chad Lafferty. He's sold his soul to Geos.

I'm late talking about this, but it's worth noting given Hoofin's recent comments on freechoice.jp and health insurance in Japan. After I was asked to take down a letter from a private insurance provider that I posted here, Hoofin went out and did some digging, and came up with a lot of interesting stuff.

1. He found that freechoice.jp's Ron Kessler is connected to HealthOne Japan.
2. In addition to HealthOne, Freechoice may also have links to other sites, including Legend Travel, Legend Travelers, and Nationalhealthinsurance.jp.
3. After Hoofin starts connecting dots, Nationalhealthinsurance.jp goes offline.

If Hoofin's findings are accurate, it makes you wonder if Kessler is honestly fighting for the right for foreigners to choose between national and private health insurance schemes or if he's fighting to protect his health insurance companies or the stakes he may have in them.

The letter that I removed from the blog concluded by urging readers to visit http://www.freechoice.jp/immigration2.asp for more information.Although the page is about "breaking news," as far as I can tell, you can't access it from anywhere within freedomchoice unless you've received the letter or were told about the page by Kessler. Despite the internal fax that apparently softens Immigration's stance on having to enroll in either shakai hoken or kokumin kenko hoken, there's been no independent verification of this to my knowledge. As it stands, the revisions to Guideline 8 are still in effect and immigration offices have signs up reminding people of the changes starting in April.

Moreover, it's difficult to think that Kessler is lobbying the government for change in good faith when he writes on the main page of his website, "Free choice means having the right to choose. A non-Japanese who desires to be on public health care should also not be denied access to it." He's full of it. Foreigners are not being denied access to healthcare in Japan. It is your right and obligation to be enrolled in shakai hoken or kokumin kenko hoken If anything is wrong, it's two things: 1) ignorance by employees and 2) far too many employers, especially in eikaiwa, intentionally not informing their employees of their right to healthcare and foisting some other plan upon them that is no more than travel insurance in disguise.

Can we trust anything on the freechoice website? His claim about Guideline 8 being put on hold hasn't been verified by any other source. Given that he may have incentives to skew things toward private insurance due to his possible connections to HealthOne, the answer has to be, "No."

An LJ reader sent me this letter from his insurance company regarding the new immigration guideline which appears to confirm that the stance on the guideline has been softened. As the letter points out, not being enrolled in a public health plan is insufficient grounds for declining a visa renewal application. It looks like a lot of instructors can breathe a sigh of relief.

Update 11/28: Hoofin makes some salient points on this issue. The focus on Guideline 8 is misplaced in that it doesn't supersede the fact that the law still compels you or your employer to enroll in a national health plan while you are working in Japan. Instead of faxes from Diet members and comments from the Immigration Bureau, we should be seeking answers from the Health Ministry and Social Insurance Agency who have authority over this matter.

Update 12/7: Dmca.com has contacted Let's Japan and informed me that their client requested that this URL be taken down since I posted private and confidential correspondence intended for their client only. On that note, I've removed the letter from this post.