TEFL is great in many ways. Appreciative students, fun lessons, creating our own materials.
But that’s not always matched by our working conditions. Zero-hours contracts. Wages that didn’t keep up with inflation long before the cost-of-living crisis. We’re often forced to leave the industry when we want to start a family or get a mortgage.
The good news is that when TEFL workers stand together, we gain real concessions from our employers.
Here are five of the victories that we achieved through our organising might and solidarity.
Kaplan teachers secure their proper redundancy
When the redundancy crisis hit the TEFL industry during the pandemic, Kaplan began a company-wide redundancy process.
Many Kaplan teachers were on rolling fixed-term contracts. This meant their contracts ended and re-started each year. As a result, Kaplan was claiming nearly all of their hourly teachers had less than two years of service, meaning a paltry payout if they did get made redundant.
But the Kaplan workers had the TEFL Workers’ Union on their side. We had many members at Kaplan before the redundancy crisis and this meant we could support them and their workmates through the redundancy process.
In particular, we were able to tell our members about the ‘4-year rule’. If you’re on a series of fixed-term contracts for over four years, you become a permanent employee by default.
By collective action, countless redundancy payments went from hundreds of pounds to thousands of pounds. In one instance, one long-serving teacher went from a payout of £1500 to nearly £15,000! It pays to be in the union.
Speak Up and win!
Speak Up London is one of the many small schools that populate the UK English language teaching industry. It’s also a school where the TEFL Workers’ Union has long had members.
Our most notable victory landed us on the front page of the EL Gazette when union members briefly occupied the school and, within an hour, won a teacher thousands of pounds in backpay for bogus unpaid “training” lessons.
Some time later, workers there joined the union en masse. Through working collectively, they were able to negotiate a pay rise and an agreed payscale with management.
EF teachers across the UK win backpay for unpaid training and holiday pay
In another victory to come out of the redundancy crisis, teachers at EF took the opportunity to join the TEFL Workers’ Union, ensuring they had support and back-up as they took on EF and its billionaire owners.
During the redundancy process, the union was able to discovered staff hadn’t been accruing holiday pay during the time they’d been on furlough. On top of this, EF had been requiring staff to do health and safety training when they started the job – without paying them.
All of this was illegal, but when workers first raised it with management, EF used every excuse in the book to avoid their responsibilities. But when a group of workers filed for an employment tribunal, EF backed down.
Across the UK, workers were all given back pay. The courage and dedication of our members meant that all of EF’s UK workforce received their rightful pay.
Escape teachers fight back against wage inequality
At another London school, one of our members discovered that teachers were getting paid at vastly different rates. Depending on when they were hired and whether they were teaching online or in-person, rates varied from £15 an hour to as low as £10.
Once workers got talking to each other and gained the support of a union rep, the workers called a staff meeting and brought their demands for pay parity to their managers.
This led to the owner of the school flying in from overseas to meet with the staff to discuss their concerns. Workers drew up what they felt to be a fair payscale and, through negotiation with management, were able to secure everyone a pay rise and equalise pay rates across the teaching staff.
Online teachers secure directly employed status – and back pay!
A group of online teachers from the Overseas Teacher were concerned that they were not getting paid properly when students cancelled. They were also suffering massive fines for petty infractions that were outside of their control, and were on bogus self-employed contracts.
Luckily, the teachers at the Overseas Teacher had already built up a network amongst themselves and had prepared a group letter to send to management.
As a union, we assigned a rep to their campaign and advised the teachers to challenge their self-employed status. The workers, who were mostly in their late teens and early twenties, began to raise their issues collectively with management.
Their perseverance paid off as legal, moral, and financial support from the union forced the Overseas Teacher to employ all their staff directly and secured back pay for all our members to recover things like unpaid holiday accrual and unjustified fines.
The success of the Overseas Teachers demonstrate the power of collective organising. If you have a problem at work, speak to trusted workmates, raise issues collectively, and do it with the back-up of an experienced union rep. TEFL bosses may be nice or they may be dodgy, but none of them are invincible. When we stand together, we can make our voices heard. It’s our only hope if we want to change this industry for the better.
If you work in a UK-based English language school and you have a problem at work, the TEFL Workers’ Union (IWW) has got your back! Union membership is open to all non-managerial members of staff (not just teachers!) so if you want to join us as we fight to #MakeTEFLaCareer, email us at [email protected]. A union rep will get back to you and meet with you and your workmates to discuss how we can support you to make your workplace better.