Teachers at the online teaching platform Learnship have joined the German FAU union and are demanding higher wages, more job security, and more transparency from management. Below, one the teachers talks to us about the organising campaign.
1. Give us some background to the dispute. What are the main issues?
The main issue is that in the last few years, conditions for English teachers at Learnship have been steadily declining in the following ways:
No more pay raises
Previously, teachers were afforded a 1-euro pay rise every year following a positive evaluation. That policy was curtailed in 2018. For example, I was offered 16 euro per hour as a relatively inexperienced English teacher in 2016. I was given a raise to 17 euros per hour in 2017. My rate has not changed since then, despite the fact that I’ve taught many courses for Learnship in the past 6 years and have been involved in retaining loyal customers and influencing the renewal of their courses. Learnship sells courses B2B (business to business), and businesses pay much higher hourly rates for which teachers see only a fraction.
Cancellation policy
Since our clients are businesspeople, they cancel at the last minute quite frequently. In 2018, a new and very difficult cancelation policy was introduced: If a student cancels less than 6 hours before a class or simply doesn’t show up to the class, the teacher is paid only 33% of their normal rate. The student still ‘loses’ the class and cannot reschedule it, and the remaining 66% of the teacher’s hourly rate goes back into Learnship’s marketing budget. This policy has resulted in substantial and unpredictable income loss for teachers, who make themselves available during class times and prepare for classes only to be unable to predict whether they’ll be compensated their full rate for that timeslot.
Silent pay cuts
In the past few months, a lot of teachers in the Facebook group have been complaining about suddenly not receiving any more new courses for a long time. Many of these teachers emailed their support teams and were invited to schedule calls. During the calls, they were told that there wasn’t any demand for Learnship’s higher-priced products at their rate of pay. One teacher was told that Learnship did not expect to have courses available in the future at a higher rate than 15 euro per hour, and that trainers who receive a higher wage are not able to receive requests for new courses. The only option for teachers to receive new courses again has been for them to sign contracts agreeing to a lower pay rate for the exact same work they’ve been doing for years.
These silent pay cuts are being done completely in the dark, without any announcement or proactive acknowledgment from Learnship’s end. If not for the Facebook group, teachers would never know about these calls or that others have also not been receiving course requests.
Renewing students passed on to lower-paid trainers
Additionally, many teachers are now being told that they will not be assigned renewal courses from longtime students unless they accept a lower hourly rate. Instead, those courses are passed on to newer trainers hired at lower hourly rates ranging from 12-15 euros per hour.
The wages being offered are insultingly low for loyal and experienced teachers who also spend time on preparation and admin. These wages are economically crippling, as most of Learnship’s teachers live in developed countries in which these wages are completely unsustainable. Although Learnship’s teachers are technically freelance workers, many of them derive a large portion of their income from their work with Learnship.
There have been many other problems as well, related to lack of transparency and clarity in communication, inability to contact anyone who has decision-making power at Learnship, and tech problems on Learnship’s end that cost teachers a lot of unpaid time. However, for the sake of brevity, let’s focus on the ones listed above.
2. Tell us about your union, the FAU. How have they helped support you all?
The FAU has had our back in a big way. They’ve assigned a (really really good) representative to us and started a Learnship workplace group in which a group of trainers gather with our FAU representative and meet for a monthly video call. Every month, we plan out future actions or work on current projects. Recently, we’ve put together a press release and contributed to an article that was subsequently written about Learnship’s unjust and unsustainable practices. That article can be found here.
With their support, we were also featured in this article from 2021. The FAU’s own publication, Direkte Aktion, also wrote about us here. And finally, here’s the German Labournet’s dossier on us, also published with the help of the FAU.
The FAU has also authored multiple letters to Learnship that our workplace group has put together on behalf of teachers (although we have never received a response). Our representative has spent hours calling Learnship on our behalf in hopes of reaching someone with decision-making power, and has helped us organize other actions, such as many teachers coordinating to leave honest reviews of Learnship on Glassdoor and other employer rating sites within the span of a few days. These are just a few examples. The FAU has really stood behind us and we’re extremely grateful to them.
3. If you could sit down with Learnship management and get them to really understand one thing, what would it be?
That they should care about their teachers. That their teachers are the most important part of their business, and that we might be able to build a collaboration that’s better for everyone involved if upper management were willing to actually engage with teachers and listen to our concerns directly.
4. What’s the main piece of advice you’d have for other online teachers who are having problems at work?
Don’t accept teaching jobs paid at less than $20 per hour. If some of us are willing to accept wages well below our worth, conditions in the whole industry will deteriorate.
5. This one’s a bit vague, but how has being involved with the union and this dispute changed how you see the industry?
I have a more big-picture view of our industry now. I can see that what happens at Learnship and other big online language teaching companies influences the industry as a whole. Through my involvement with the FAU and our dispute with Learnship, I’ve also learned more about my rights as a freelancer and about conditions in the online language teaching industry as a whole as well as, by extension, the entire platform workers industry/gig economy. I’ve come to understand that we online language teachers and platform/gig workers exist in a very precarious space in which we possess very little negotiating power over our wages, despite being freelancers, yet we also don’t have the stability or benefits that come from being an employee.
6. If other TEFL workers want to support you all, what can they do?
Talk about us! Learnship hates bad press, and so far our attempts to initiate communication with upper management have been unsuccessful. So, maybe they will respond to bad press. Talk about us, write about us, and make it publicly known that you support our cause. It’s also your cause, because when one big company treats teachers badly without consequence, others will follow suit.
7. Anything else you’d like to add? Any message you’d like to convey to TEFL workers in the UK?
Don’t accept low and unsustainable wages for the work you do.