In response to Re: This is a broad ranging 10-month salary scam across China (Raoul F. Duke)

Foreign teachers are simply a tool for making money, to be cast aside when no longer needed.

That may be true, and I've certainly said similar things in particularly grim moments. But aren't we being overly pessimistic here? Aren't there some people who would actually value a good foreign teacher? Do we chalk it all up to nationalism or worse, racism?

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I hear words like "sense" or "logic" applied to China. You're not going to find them in China, either...at least not from our viewpoints. If you try to apply them, you're only going to hurt yourself.

One can still use one's own logic within China, and if they can't use it we can to outsmart and outmaneuver them. Plenty of students use logic, and I'm sure it's used, actually, in business. There is carefully crafted scheming and conniving, all based on logic. It's often false logic, because the long term effects aren't taken into consideration. So, I'd say, we can apply logic to any situation to circumnavigate their thought processes and win ourselves a better situation (I've done it a number of times, even though I've been told it's impossible). It's a game of strategy being here. I guess I'm saying that even though what they do may appear illogical, there is logic behind it and we can usually pretty easily discover what it is, especially if we start with the simple assumption that unfettered greed and selfishness is the driver of their decision making process. Did I go off on a tangent?

Most of them work summer camps, or short-term training-center gigs, or do private tutoring to get through the summer.

That sucks. What a holiday! Summer camp! That's a sorry situation for a teacher who is often required to have an advanced degree and a teaching certificate to find him or herself in. And that's NOT making it. That's working one's ass off in one's holiday just to stay afloat.

precious few schools are going to pay us for not teaching anything.

It's not paying us for nothing, it's NOT shorting us of 1/6th of the installments or our yearly salary. It's just like in the States where teachers get summers off, but they aren't paid for doing nothing, their salary is just spread out over the whole year. It's a misperception to think of teacher's salaries in public schools as "monthly wages" rather than as monthly installments of a yearly wage.

There's no shortage of real scams out there to talk about. This just isn't one of them. This is standard practice, and for once not completely unreasonable.

Maybe we have a semantic disagreement, but on the face of it I completely disagree with you. Making university teachers take on summer gigs, or go without money and run out of it, is NOT IMO reasonable, nor is it apparently the original standard practice.

We can either take the jobs as given, or not.

Or we can try to negotiate for a fairer deal. Sometimes the ball comes into our court.

Survival is our own responsibility, not the schools'

A job should pay adequately for a teacher to survive. If it doesn't because they are undercutting the wages that the government set up, the reason we wouldn't survive is their own deviousness and scamming. Should we blame every employee if they can't survive on the wages they're given? Should we blame migrant workers and sweat shop seamstresses for not going somewhere else? If we all just accept it or go somewhere else than, of course, the corrupt schools will continue to cheat us out of a sizable portion of our salaries, and even more so.

Nice to know someone has such a different viewpoint from mine. Makes the world a richer place.