I doubt that you can call teaching assistants, who have not even graduated from uni and have no teaching experience at all, 'peers'.

I wouldn't call Chinese teaching assistants my 'peers' either, and from what I've been told by a Kenyan friend of mine teaching English in China, it is the case that Kenyans generally wouldn't either.
And this leads me to explain a couple of Kenyan telephone tricks that were used by them to get their own back on haughty teaching assistants who had been downright rude and unfair to them.

Trick one: Call your t/a from the county seat late on Sunday night to inform her you got drunk as a lord and therefore wouldn't be able to return to the county to teach on Monday. Then turn off your mobile so that she isn't able to communicate with you. She will have to explain to the school why there won't be any teaching on Monday morning just before the first class. Of course, she will make up a story, after having reported everything to the company. Sje will be told what to say by the director.

Trick two: Having had enough of her nitpicking re your teaching, you decide to pull a runner at the weekend. You know she will be at the school gate awaiting you on Monday morning just before the first class of the day. When you don't arrive, she'll try to call you. But the number she calls will be that of a buddy of yours, whose telephone number you had recently given her. He will know nothing about where you are. She will rush to your apartment to knock you up, but no-one will open the door. Just then, she will twig that you've scarpered. Then she will call the company for advice, and go back to the school to tell some lies so that the company isn't put in a bad light. The reason you'll get away with this trick is that you've been illegally employed on a non-Z visa. So, your company daren't involve the PSB.

From a public school (or indeed a private school) headmaster's viewpoint, employing an FT and a t/a through an agent makes good economic sense. A t/a supplied by an agent lives in poor accommodation and earns a low salary that doesn't include holiday pay. Another thing is that the school can easily get shot off an FT they dislike. The agent will send a replacement FT timeously. Of course, the agent will have sent the school the FT's photo and resume first.