Most of us are familiar with the idea of ELT as a global industry. But while it is not uncommon for teachers to move around and work in various countries and contexts, grasping an understanding of something as big as a ‘global’ industry is no small task. It can be difficult for teachers, and other workers in the industry, to connect with one another and to draw links between our experiences, our struggles, and our successes and failures.
I do not have ‘the answer’ for how to achieve this interconnectedness by any means, but what I am certain of, is that a great number of issues which teachers relate to me when I interview them for my research resonate with other teachers across the world. Sometimes this comes as something of a surprise to teachers who, on occasion, feel that their frustrations are endemic to the school, city, or country in which they work. Many of us will have experienced that the grass is not always greener after we have upped sticks to a new place of work only to find ourselves dealing with the same frustrations as before.
So while in this blog post I am very far from painting a comprehensive picture of the global ELT industry, there do seem to be a number of tendencies that permeate ELT globally, tendencies which need to be addressed.
Pay
For some, the lot of ELT teachers in recent decades has declined in recent decades. The following is one teacher’s account of English language teaching in Barcelona in the 1980s:
After two years, I got a twenty-five hours a week contract (the maximum allowed) and was paid roughly €35,000 [approx. $42,500] a year in today’s money. I had eighteen weeks paid holiday a year, so could make extra money doing summer intensive courses. I had a work permit, pension, and full social security and health coverage. (quoted in Whipple & Bowe, 2019)
More recently in Spain however, the drafted conveni or collective agreement between language schools and teachers represented by unions, proposed in 2018 a minimum hourly rate for English language teachers of €12.20 [approx. $14.80] per hour, which with an annual teaching workload of 1,300 hours (also stipulated in the proposed conveni) equates to a minimum salary threshold of under €16,000 [approx. $19,400] (McMillan, 2018). While comparing an individual account of teaching in the 1980s with the more recent conveni proposal is not in itself any kind of conclusive evidence of a historical shift in the working conditions of the Spanish ELT industry, it does certainly resonate with the accounts given of teachers in Japan who similarly cite salaries, job security and benefits in the 1980s (Budmar, 2012a, 2012b) that might well be the envy of those entering the industry in more recent years.
Unpaid Labour
Often in ELT, the notion of teaching ‘work’ denotes the time spent producing lessons (commonly referred to as ‘contact hours’), and downplays or excludes altogether any preparatory work performed before, or subsequent to, the lesson itself. The same Spanish conveni discussed above proposes one hour of paid non-teaching work time for every 30 hours of teaching time, meaning in effect, teachers would be paid for two minutes of preparatory work, marking, or other work, per one hour of class time (McMillan, 2018). This is extremely similar to the manner in which teaching time (contact hours) comes to be all but synonymous with working time – i.e. work for which the teacher is paid, most evident in the pay-per-lesson forms of remuneration found in Japan.
In Canada (Meuse, 2016) and Japan (General Union, 2015a) there have been union backed struggles that seek to have work performed outside of contact hours recognised as work to be paid, with estimates of 10 to 20 percent of unpaid hours in preparatory work regularly performed by teachers, equating to three to five hours of unpaid labour per week (Meuse, 2016). On a similar theme, the King Report, a report commissioned by the Irish government to explore the feasibility of statutory minimum standards in the Irish ELT sector, found that “only a fifth of teachers are paid for non-teaching contract duties e.g. preparation time” (King, 2019, p. 7).
Precarity
Irregular part-time or freelance contracts for teachers seem relatively commonplace across a number of contexts. In Ireland, Marketing English Ireland (MEI), a company to which 66 English language schools are affiliated for the purposes of promoting commercial ELT in Ireland, describe the sector as employing over 3000 workers full time and over 7,000 seasonal and part time workers (MEI (Marketing English Ireland), n.d.), a 30% – 70% full-time to part-time employee ratio almost identical to those working in language schools in Japan (METI, 2019). In the U.S., Berry & Blanchette describe how the majority of teachers in the New York branch of the international English language school chain Kaplan “work 30–35 hours per week, just a few hours shy of the 37.5 hours needed to be classified [as] full time” (2015, p. 448) and hence are not legally entitled to a number of benefits – a practice similarly found in Japan (Currie-Robson, 2015).
As with many industries the world over, the outbreak of covid-19 has put serious stress on the ELT industry. There is however, reason for seeing the covid-19 pandemic as more of a catalyst than direct cause for closures and redundancies. No doubt the pandemic has greatly exacerbated an already volatile industry, though examples of snap closures of schools certainly predate it in Canada (Meuse, 2016), and in Ireland (Pollak, 2018), and most strikingly in what the activist group ELT Advocacy Ireland termed a ‘College Closure Crisis’ in 2014 when closures “finally totalled up to 17 [ELT] schools and colleges in the for-profit private education sector […] about 1 closure in every 7 year-round private language schools in Dublin” (ELT Advocacy Ireland, 2017).
It’s not just you
There are then, I would argue, a range of trends or tendencies within many, though by no means all instantiations of commercial ELT across the globe. The tendency towards an increasing casualisation of teacher labour – the increase in part-time and/or ‘freelance’ terms of employment can be found in a range of contexts globally. Indeed, I think it would be fair to say that much of the precarity and volatility of the industry which covid-19 has exacerbated, would be instantly recognised by teachers in the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Ireland, Canada, Japan and no doubt elsewhere. So what should we make of all this? My aim here has not been to turn anyone off from English language teaching altogether. Rather, I think we should recognise that when we face these issues of short-termism, precarity, low pay and unpaid labour etc., we must recognise that these are very often not endemic or particular to our own work-lives, but are shared among a great number of people the world over.
It’s not just you. And if the problem isn’t just you, then neither will the solution be.
Will Simpson (Lecturer at Tokyo University of Science, Japan)
References
Berry, J., & Blanchette, J. (2015). Teaching and Organizing in For-Profit Higher Education: A Kaplan Story. WorkingUSA, 18(3), 447–456. https://doi.org/10.1111/wusa.12192
Budmar, P. (2012a, July 3). The curious case of the eroding eikaiwa salary. The Japan Times. https://doi.org/02/02/2019
Budmar, P. (2012b, September 4). With Berlitz beaten but not bowed, union fights on. The Japan Times. https://doi.org/02/02/2019
Currie-Robson, C. (2015). English to go: Inside Japan’s teaching sweathsops. Amazon CreateSpace.
ELT Advocacy Ireland. (2017). ELT Advocacy Ireland: Origins. ELT Advocacy Ireland. https://eltadvocacy.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/elt-advocacy-ireland-origins/
General Union. (n.d.). Gaba meets general union’s demands: client blocking procedure published. General Union Website.
General Union. (2015). Gaba hides client sexual harassment – punishes instructors. General Union Website. http://www.generalunion.org/gaba/1323-gaba-hides-client-sexual-harassment-punishes-instructors
King, P. (2019). Commercial English Language Sector: Report of Mediator to Minister Mary Mitchell O’Connor T.D.
McMillan, N. (2018). Divided unions, continuing precarity for Spain’s teachers. https://www.teachersasworkers.org/divided-unions-continuing-precarity-for-spains-teachers/
MEI (Marketing English Ireland). (n.d.). COVID-19 (CORONAVIRUS). MEI (Marketing English Ireland). Retrieved January 22, 2021, from https://mei.ie/covid-19-coronavirus-information/
METI. (2019). Foriegn language conversation schools. www.meti.go.jp/statistics/tyo/tokusabido/result/result_1/xls/hv15601j.xls – 2019-02-18
Meuse, M. (2016). ESL teachers’ strike cancels English classes for 600 Vancouver students. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vec-teachers-strike-1.3707963
Pollak, S. (2018). Hundreds of foreign students left frustrated and confused at college closure. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/hundreds-of-foreign-students-left-frustrated-and-confused-at-college-closure-1.3718333
The ELT Worker. (2019). The ELT Worker (Vol. 1, Issue 3).
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