Union: Interac Dispute Update

13 comments

1. Good luck with everything!

   The problem is that since arguably all the other ALT companies are worse it’d need all of the companies to change. Also there is always so much demand with ALT positions, why would they want to change?

2. Post footage of you guys protesting in front of intetac HQ

3. Solidarity! Companies not being willing to provide basic health and safety concessions in a pandemic is just shameful.

4. So, Interac offers poverty wages and no benefits….

   Why do people keep taking jobs with them again? Oh yeah, “because Japan!”

   As long as people are willing to work for low wages to get to Japan, nothing is going to change. Covid slowed recruiting down a bit but things are going to go back to normal in another year or so. Nothing will change. If you’re working for Interac, do yourself a favor and get out. Find other gainful employment. All dispatch companies are trash.

5. Why partial strikes? No better time for a full on strike. They can’t hire new teachers from overseas.

6. [removed]

7. there is like 400 new ALT waiting to come into japan. Interac has no incentive to provide better working conditions and quite frankly are very good compared to other dispatch companies. Use them for visa and find better jobs

8. Good for you! Screw these companies as they do not value you at all -you are chattel . I have only been here about half a year and thought I would have an advantage showing up during the pandemic. It’s been a struggle finding any work with worthy conditions or pay. The ESL industry is garbage here. I am so thankful to get on at a proper educational institution not doing any ESL. I say go on full strike if you can as they can’t get anyone from overseas now. Good luck!

9. It’s tragic really, because the replacement teacher who has to go in will usually sit there in the principal’s office while the principal either gives the Interac staff person an earful or they lament together over how lame the striking ALT is. Can you imagine the conversation?

   Then when the ALT comes back the next day, everyone pretends like nothing happened, even though the sod has just committed social seppuku and lost all credit in the minds of 100% of the teachers and kids. He’s virtually a leper from that moment on, because he followed the instructions of outsiders, never to recover the status he had before that day.

   Those outsiders don’t care about kids or education, they just care about defending sods who are unmotivated and antisocial sods with poor teaching skills. If their organization really cared about the teachers, they’d be offering Japanese and business manners lessons and trying to help get them out of being ALTs, but instead they prefer them to be “dependent” on the same system they are trying to fight so they can collect dues.

10. Good. Keep fighting these shitters.

11. I do agree that if you raise wages and make it a slighter higher bar for entry, you will weed out a lot of the weebs and undesirables. That should be the ultimate goal. Unfortunately a lot of these “unions” are teachers first, students eighth.

    I always felt that there was a disconnect between these people and the job itself. A lot of them are dudes that get married in Japan and then decide they should be paid way more in order to raise a family on the job – despite not speaking Japanese or having any direct qualifications to justify a considerable wage hike for the work they do.

    As much as I loathe the dispatch companies, they offer something that the BOEs can’t do – which is to source clients from overseas and manage all the piddle and crap stemming from the language barrier. Yeah, you have the JET programme which does this, but it does this at significantly higher cost to the BOEs and even recently is massively outsourcing its own resources.

    I work with so many people who should be nowhere near children. The problem is these long-termers tend to calcify in the job and are the ones pushing for more benefits and unionisation, and tend to be the worst of the worst when it comes to actual teaching ability.

    Maybe we need to actually fix this, before pushing the concept of more money. Because these unions do nothing more than protect bad teachers, rather than retaining good ones imo.

12. One small ray of hope is, interac is churning through native speakers like you wouldn’t believe, and as Korean culture becomes more popular, and other Asian countries pay better, the supply will keep dwindling.

    It is already dwindling at an insane pace, even before the pandemic, interac was hiring almost exclusively from the Phillipines and Jamaica, there were 215 ALTs at my training. Only about 75 were from ‘Native’ English speaking countries, and that number keeps going down.

    Combined with the pandemic things are getting laughable.

    My BOE supposedly hired 6 new ALTs for this year to match the increasing number of English lessons taught at school, now I don’t know why they did this, but 3 of those 6 quit the day they got here. I mean like they did the quarantine at their hotels, and just dissapeared.

    So now there are 5-6 schools in my BoE who just don’t have an ALT, and Interac won’t be able to get anyone until mid-October/November at the absolute earliest.

    And I know another few ALTs who didn’t get paid time off to go get their vaccines, and just put in their notice out of annoyance for that.

    The change will be slow, but things will get better. Also Japan made a law that any company with more than 50 employees must pay shakai hoken if they work more than 20 hours a week starting in 2 years.

    So they will have to keep cutting themselves up into subsidiary small companies until that becomes untenable.

    Being an ALT is actually a pretty great job if you take it seriously, but all of the surrounding bullshit destroys it.

    I mean I work 3 jobs, and I am still barely above water because I have a wife and kid. But I love going to school everyday.

13. Isn’t the main cause of this the schools using sweatshops like Interac, rather than the sweatshop itself?