A couple of weeks ago, as I was describing my job hunt in the effort to get back to Korea, Johnny H. mentioned something that fits commonly with America/Western cultural norms where it concerns contracts:

A lot of people might think it’s a bit dishonest to sign a contract when you plan to break it. I guess you’re assuming no one at SMOE who gives a hoot reads your blog. Or the university. You might find yourself without any job if you advertise too widely that you sign job contracts without any strong plans to honor them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for taking care of no. 1, and I don’t owe any prospective employer anything except doing the job I agree to do for an agreed-upon amount of money. But I would do my shopping before I accepted a position, not after.

I responded in the comments section there and then turned it into a full post, because this is one of the common features of life for a large chunk of the expat crowd in Korea – the TESOLers, and GI Korea’s pulls in more of the military and contractor crowd who might not have had to deal with or heard much about these aspects of expat life in Korea.

Today is a follow up.

If you go check out Dave’s ESL Cafe right now, you’ll see some pissed off people talking in a handful of growing threads on what has just happened in the public school section of the ESL industry.  Here is a note from someone claiming to be a member of one of the recruiting agencies — (by saying “claiming” I don’t mean to imply he is lying, but on the internet, and especially among the TESOLers at Dave’s, you never really know for sure…)

We were first informed that the SMOE was cutting candidates last minute on the evening of Wednesday the 19th. I would assume this is when the word went out to all the recruiters involved as well as teachers recruited directly by the SMOE. We were not given a reason initially – we were told that that the SMOE needed to cut 100 out of the 600 teachers recruited total. Later we were given the reason that schools came in Seoul came in with less job orders at the last minute due to budget cuts. That is all we know at this point.

TESOLers hired by SMOE were supposed to report for orientation by the 23rd or 24th – meaning their recruiters were told 100 of these people were going to have their contracts canceled on the Thursday or Friday before they were supposed to arrive in Korea on Monday or Tuesday.

Many of these people will have already purchased a ticket that SMOE said it would reimburse after they go to their schools.  Many of these people even already had the visas stamped into their passports.  I guess I was one of the lucky ones in that I was notified I’d been dropped two days after I was told the visa paperwork I needed to take to the consulate was in route via FedEx…

This is Korea – at least the ESL section of it…

Being a veteran of it, I wasn’t going to buy a ticket until I had the visa in my passport, but now I know even that would not have protected me.  The visa is typically the point of no return — and still is for the TESOLer.  You have to go through a lot of trouble to get out of your visa in order to change jobs with another school sponsoring a new visa.

But, apparently, even the Korean government public schools can throw your contract and visa in the toilet if they decide they don’t need or want you anymore.

If you have an E-2 visa, the ministries of education should be able to work together to facilitate visa transfers from the SMOE to other MOE’s and POE’s utilizing your documents already in Korea. Our staff is looking into visa transfers from the SMOE to private schools for E-2 visa holders. This issue is proving to be more problematic, but we are looking at how this can get done – I don’t have definite information at this point as we are getting conflicting information from immigration, the MOJ, SMOE and the NIIED.

It seemed the massive growth in public school positions was giving some credibility to the Korea ESL industry.  You didn’t have to worry about being cheated out of pay.

Now, the Korean government itself, not a bunch of crooked hakwons, has shot Korea in the foot.  If it turns out to be a one-year screw up, maybe it won’t mean much.  If it turns out to be a recurring trend, Korea’s reputation will sink even lower due to the amount of complaining educated, tech savvy Westerns will be doing on the Internet.  At minimum, this will be another black eye for Korea for the next couple of years online…

I hesitated somewhat in posting this here at GI Korea’s, because there are other venues for the ESL stuff and people, and that crowd can be annoying with flame wars and so on…  It was a coin toss, but I thought this was a big enough event – because it is the Korean government directly doing the shafting – it might be worthwhile to give the GI Korea crowd a firsthand window into how the other large section of expats in Korea live…

We are trying to get this sorted as quickly as possible as there are hagwons interested in employing these teachers. I’ll post again when I have definitive answers to E-2 visa transfers from the SMOE to private schools – at this point it does not appear that a simple LOR will suffice as the teachers were never registered in Korea in the first place.

In my own case, I was dropped just before getting the visa, but I am not sure how this is going to influence my plans:

If a significant amount of TESOLers are going to be dumped into the Seoul area without jobs, the hakwon market will probably be even tighter than it has been this year.  I might have to give up the idea of working there or in the suburbs.  I hate to do that because I was really counting on doing some NK-related work.  But the priority is to get there and help out my wife’s mother and family since her father died…

Regardless, I booked a ticket for the first week in September.  Being there in person will help, and I have higher qualifications than the vast majority of TESOLers that will be entering the country.  I’d like to find a position in my target area, but I am not worried about finding an adequate job somewhere.