Yesterday I finally got some sense out of i-to-i when I had a phone call from the Korea in country coordinator. However whilst trying to convince me my contract didn’t violate labour laws he inadvertently dropped i-to-i in the shit yet again by revealing another way in which my contract is illegal (I’ll come to that in a bit). Is there no end to i-to-i’s incompetence?

Having received an email from i-to-i last week telling me my contract was “legal with immigration” and this overruled anything the labour board said I emailed the Korea in country coordinator, John Lee, copying the email to i-to-i in the UK, asking if he could provide me evidence of this.

He obviously couldn’t provide evidence of this because it isn’t the case, so yesterday he called me to try and convince me verbally he was correct. But realising I knew what I was talking about, and he didn’t, he gave up and instead asked my to provide evidence that my contract is illegal. Apparently the Labour Standards Act doesn’t constitute evidence.

During our conversation he finally came through on the “support” offered by i-to-i saying that if the school don’t pay me he will help become involved in the dispute. Now if he had just said this when I initially contacted him before I resigned all this could have been avoided. However it seems he has only offered this “support” now because i-to-i are starting to realise I do know what I’m talking about and they are in the shit.

The school have assured me I will get all monies due and I believe they will come through on their word. There is no reason therefore to involve the labor board in the case as I’m not convinced the school knew what was in the contract and even if they did they have learnt their lesson and apparently changed them for the incoming teachers.

I eventually convicted John not to contact the school or get labour to contact the school because I don’t want to upset the director and risk him deciding not to pay me my monies after all. It was then that John revealed his latest bombshell.

Apparently as a worker from the UK I am supposed to have paid pension contributions every month. These contributions are shared with the school and total around 100,000 won (60GBP) each per month. This is the first time any of this has been mentioned to me and John explained: “Most schools don’t do it because it makes it harder to find foreign teachers if they do.” (I’m assuming this is because it would makes the wages less.) So I haven’t paid pension for nine months – that’s a lot of money. And now I discover that if labour do become involved they will find out pension contributions haven’t been made and I will be liable for the back payments. All because the dodgy school and useless i-to-i neglected to mention anything about until now!

So now my challenge is to prove to i-to-i that my contract violates the Labour Standards Act without letting labour know who I am or where I work to avoid them finding out I’ve inadvertently not made pension contributions.

* Posted by j150vsc on 30/05/2007.