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What You Should Know About Contract Renewal

Teaching English in China: Contract Renewal

If you would like to stay with your current employer for another year, you should provide them with as much notice as possible—even four to five months notice if possible. Remember that schools in China are constantly receiving applications from prospective teachers throughout the school year. An incumbent teacher will always have the hiring advantage—assuming the school is content enough with that teacher’s performance—because Chinese employers generally prefer to stay with what they know instead of taking a risk on a new teacher, even if the new prospect looks better on paper. However, if you don’t provide your school’s officials with advanced notice of your intention to stay, they may just assume that you are not interested in remaining for another year and they will start taking a closer look at all those new applications.

Some foreign teachers are reticent to provide the school with advanced notice, either way, from a strategic perspective. If their intention is to leave, they fear that they will somehow be cheated if this is known too soon and, if their intention is to renew, they believe that they’ll lose some sort of bargaining power if they commit to this decision too early. As a rule, the only thing they’ll lose by this tactic is opportunity. If a school has a history of reneging on its contractual obligations to a foreign teacher upon his departure, it doesn’t need any advance notice from the teacher to do so. Having just written this, some private school owners have been known to engage in retaliatory or punitive behaviors upon learning that the teacher does plan to leave (at the very least, the teacher is treated as if he or she has already left). If you have good reason to believe this is the case with your current employer, you will want to be vague about your intentions to leave until one month prior to contract expiration—unless you are contractually obligated to provide more than one month’s notice.

The HR convention of providing employees with an automatic annual salary or cost-of-living increase is purely a Western one, not Chinese (although we are aware of at least one school in China that does). Wages are, overall, static and, in 2006, in anticipation of Beijing’s plan to appreciate the RMB by 17% over the next two years, the government cut all starting foreign teacher salaries at public schools and universities by approximately 10% and travel allowances, in some cases, were slashed by as much as 50% (although those hired prior to 2006 were “grandfathered-in”). For example, a 500 RMB salary increase per month means 6,000 RMB out of the university’s or owner’s pocket above what a replacement teacher would cost (at the same former starting salary). Most owners realize foreign teachers are only go to stay a limited number of years, so any increase in salary would have to be direclty linked to a corresponding, immediate and significant increase in foreign teacher productivity or profit: That is unlikely to be the case for most foreign teachers unless the school requires an entirely different or additional service (e.g., foreign teacher is promoted to head teacher, the school requires curriculum or website development, etc.).

Replacing a teacher almost never incurs an additional annual expense of 6,000 yuan, so unless that particular teacher is perceived as both absolutely essential and very hard to replace, the final decision will almost always be to just let the current teacher leave if he insists on a raise or another costly request as a necessary condition of his contract renewal. Related, any teacher who is eventually successful at forcing the issue of a raise in his favor (for example, in the case of a school that was desperate) can bet his life on the fact that the school will then, in turn, do whatever it can—throughout the entire term of the new contract—to compensate itself for that “loss” by attempting to extract more work out of that teacher or, in the alternative, by becoming withholding in ways it never had before, e.g., paying nothing or half of what it had for the teacher’s Internet expenses, arguing that a “new policy” went into effect.

Perhaps the most the majority of foreign teachers can hope for, in regard to contract renewal negotiations, are preferential changes in class scheduling, specific or contiguous days off, or an upgrade to a nicer school-owned accommodation, i.e., changes that don’t necessarily cost the school any more money.

In fact, our collective experience has shown that if a foreign teacher was, for whatever reason, brought in at a starting salary significantly higher than that of the other teachers (e.g., in the case of someone who holds an advanced degree or had initially agreed to provide services in addition to teaching), most of that teacher’s efforts and energy, during contract renewal negotiations, will be directed towards trying to hold onto the status quo. Chinese employers, including public schools and universities, are notorious for demanding more work for the same money year after year (or demanding the same amount of work for less money) when it comes to renewing the teacher’s contract, especially if they feel the foreign teacher “has it too good” (and they almost always do).

Unfortunately, when all one was really hired to do is converse in English from 12 to 20 hours per week (as the schools see it), there truly isn’t much room to bargain with, realistically speaking—certainly not when there are dozens upon dozens of other English-speaking people willing to take your place. From a Western perspective, one would think the fact that a particular teacher is well-regarded by his students and colleagues and is performing well as a teacher and team player would naturally result in an attempt on the school’s part to retain that teacher, in the absence of any unreasonable or excessive demands, but that is simply not the case in China. That might be true if our roles here as foreign English language teachers were deemed as important by educational leaders and school owners, but they are not. For the most part, we are simply viewed as meeting a national requirement or as a costly business expense, and that is a reality you should keep in mind if you would like to remain at your current school for another year.

Posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 and is filed under China Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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