No More Easy Money for English Teachers in Japan?

The industry on a whole is having problems. The reason companies usually opt for sub-par teachers is that most of them run illegal exploitation schemes on for the most part unsuspecting employees. For instance, by law all companies in Japan are required to enroll their workers in the mandatory National Health Insurance scheme, but many try to get around this and trick their employees into paying for the insurance on their own by instating 29.5 hour a week work schedules. The ploy is that this supposedly is just under full time and therefore makes workers ineligible for insurance benefits. However, not only are workers still required to “be on duty” for the normal 40 or so hours (you are paid for 29.5, but required to work 40), but even this claim is in fact illegal, as all workers are in reality guaranteed insurance coverage by law regardless of whether they work 0.5 hours under some time limit or not.

This is just one example. Many ALT dispatch companies (which are rapidly replacing the JET program all over the country) also pocket anywhere from half to even 75% of worker’s monthly salaries, a practice that not only many workers are ignorant to, but even the local board of educations that pay the salaries via the dispatch companies usually don’t know about either. Similarly, most of these companies pocket a major percentage of (or sometimes all of) the workers’ vacation salaries, by telling them that they do not receive vacation salaries, or that salaries are reduced during vacation time (even though the local boards of education are still in fact paying the same amount).

Pairing this with the fact that the majority of English teaching positions in Japan are more glorified host entertaining than actual language instruction (not applicable to everyone however), and it becomes more obvious why it’s hard to keep qualified teachers in place within an environment that is often designed to exploit them heavily and then toss them out by the time that they become aware of their rights. This becomes quite literal, as dispatch companies typically fire (euphemistically, “not renew their contracts”) their employees right at the 5 year mark because Japanese law also states that after 5 years of service, workers must be hired on a full-time, permanent basis. They simply dodge the responsibility this would entail by ending the worker’s contract and look for a new worker.

Things are looking up a little bit however, in that because of various legal disputes involving issues such as these, a few prefectures have opted to hire their teachers directly without any dispatcher middle-men, which guarantees workers the legal benefits they are given by Japanese law but often deprived of elsewhere. English instruction in Japan is in a harsh stage right now, but hopefully major reforms will be coming down the road.