Please avoid Language Direct!

Language Direct is a Switzerland-based company offering language lessons via internet and phone for a large range of languages. Momentarily they are recruiting English and German teachers by posting on craigslist. According to their own website they are only employing native speakers with university degree, at least 2 years' teaching experience and they want their teachers to be multilingual too. That is, their demands in terms of qualification are rather high, while their pay is not.

They offered me "14 Euro/hour" as a starting wage for teaching my native language German as a freelancer, which sounded just acceptable. However, they failed to specify that this was the recompensation for a hypothetical 60-minute lesson. Normal lessons of a duration of 30 or 45 minutes will earn you 7 Euro/ 10,50 respectively. And you have to teach lessons as bookings come in, sometimes with less than a day's notice before lessons take place.

As lessons have to be individually designed according to the varying needs of businesspeople and higher level employees of bigger companies, and as Language Direct does not provide any teaching materials (at least for German), lessons demand much more preparation than for a normal language class. You also have to write and hand in lesson minutes within 24 hours after each lesson, otherwise you are "fined".

If you take into account time spent on preparation, lesson minutes, student assessment, homework etc), and costs such as teaching material, technical equipment (computer, headset), workspace, internet and phone connection, this makes your recompensation drop to less than 5 Euro/hour spent working for Language Direct, if you take into account medical and social insurance (if you are lucky enough to have these, and not even speaking of taxes) this makes the rate drop to almost nothing. Therefore, what sounds somehow acceptable at the first glance, after a bit of calculation does not really seem worth the effort. I worked with Language Direct for 4 months and large part of the money I earned went into paying my internet bills, headset, teaching materials ... . After I quit the job, they even charged me a fine for the remaining bookings.

According to my opinion, Language Direct is worse than conventional (non-internet based) language schools offering low wages,
1. because they specifically target managers and people in higher positions with a comfortable income and pride themselves with their international business deals with big companies such as a major airline,
2. because they are an internet company with almost no running costs (compared to conventional schools which have to provide teaching space, teaching materials ...), and receive 33-39 Euro/60-min-lesson, which leaves them with more than 50% of what the teachers get,
3. because they are situated in Switzerland but pay rates that would not in any way allow a decent subsistence in that country or any other country in Western Europe even if one were to teach full time.

The company also has a translation department, which proved itself to be even more greedy. Having agreed with them on a moderate hourly rate for a couple of proofreading/translation jobs, they afterwards refused to pay me for the time I actually spent on these jobs, coming up with an automated calculation of words per hour, arriving at roughly 3,50 Euro/hour of concentrated, time-effective work. They first feigned interest in putting things right, but then basically fooled me for weeks, promising to look into the issue, demanding the same information over again ..., promising to write back but not doing so ... . Therefore my conclusion: this company just is not interested in serious business practices, but is exploiting its employees, pardon, "freelancers".