The Ministry of Economy Trace and Industry and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government inspected Nova’s Osaka head office and several schools in February for allegedly charging high contract cancellation fees and on suspicion that it had given the government false information about its cancellation policy.
At that time, the government warned Nova it could be forbidden from enrolling new students if officials found clear evidence of more legal violations.
At least eight lawsuits have been filed against Nova to get the company to pay refunds, and the rulings have all favored the plaintiffs, according to the plaintiff’s lawyer in Tuesday’s case.
In one of the cases, a woman argued that the information Nova provided about its cancellation policy was insufficient, claiming it was written in tiny characters in hard-to-understand language in the contract.
Top court rules Nova policy illegal / School must fully refund cancelers
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that major English school Nova Corp.’s method of settling early cancellations of its courses by using a higher unit price than when the contract was signed is illegal and violated the Specified Commercial Transaction Law.
The ruling followed a case brought by a 39-year-old man from Kita Ward, Tokyo, who tried to cancel a contract and demanded the company refund the 310,000 yen he said he was owed for classes he had not taken.
Presiding Justice Kohei Nasu ruled it is illegal to settle a contract by charging more for each unit taken than was agreed on when the contract was signed. He dismissed the appeal by Nova, and upheld and finalized the first and second rulings ordering the return of all the money demanded.
Top court: Nova’s refund tactic illegal
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an appeal filed by Nova Corp., saying the refund system of the nation’s largest English conversation school is invalid and violates the specified commercial transaction law.
The decision finalized the rulings of two lower courts that ordered Nova to refund about 310,000 yen to a former student, the full amount he was seeking.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200704040097.html
NOVA ordered to repay English tuition fees to man who cancelled contract
The top court on Tuesday dismissed an appeal by prominent English language school NOVA and ordered the group to return about 300,000 yen in prepaid tuition fees to a student who cancelled a contract.
NOVA’s tuition policy of selling classes on a point basis, with lessons becoming cheaper the more students buy, was at the center of the lawsuit.
The school had a policy of raising the price of lessons above the previously agreed fee should a student cancel a contract, thus reducing the amount it had to repay.
The Supreme Court ruled that NOVA should calculate the price of its classes on its initial rates.
The man, whose name is being withheld, paid 750,000 yen to NOVA in advance to buy points for 600 classes in 2001. The tuition fee per class was 1,200 yen.
He cancelled the contract in 2004 after finishing 386 classes. NOVA officials then said that the price of one class would come to 1,700 yen. The student claimed that NOVA should repay some 300,000 yen by calculating the price of the 386 classes at the rate set when he signed the contract.
The Supreme Court cited a law regulating commercial practices. The law provides that companies must not demand customers pay higher fees than previously agreed on if their clients cancel contracts midterm.
The National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan says it received some 7,600 complaints or inquiries about NOVA’s contract and cancellation policies from 1996 to March this year.
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070403p2a00m0na018000c.html
Strike and Nationwide Protest against Union-Busting at ELS-Berlitz in Sapporo
Demonstrators gathered in front of ELS-Berlitz schools in Sapporo, Fukuoka, and Tokyo last Saturday to protest dismissals of four union members at the Sapporo ELS-Berlitz school.
Friends and students joined union members to hand out over 600 leaflets during a strike at the Sapporo school, while in Tokyo, Berlitz teachers and other union members called for reinstatement of the Sapporo Four, and in Fukuoka, the Fukuoka General Union delivered a letter of protest during a demonstration at the ELS-Berlitz school there.
ELS bought the Berlitz school in Sapporo last April, and many teachers continued working for the new owner, teaching exactly the same Berlitz lessons, albeit under contract to a new employer. Teachers who had been unionized at Berlitz soon formed a new branch to protect their working conditions at ELS, and started negotiating with the company. ELS responded by firing one member in February, and announcing the dismissal of the other three as of March 31. Out of 17 teachers, only the union members were fired – ELS calls this “coincidence”. The union calls it unfair labour practice and a violation of Trade Union Law.
The company gives “poor performance” as the reason for dismissal, yet the teachers are all experienced instructors, ranging in seniority from 6 years to 27 years, and have held positions of responsibility such as Instructional Supervisor and Assistant Instructional Supervisor at the school. One of the dismissed members is still being asked to do assessments and demo lessons for prospective customers, hardly a job one would assign to a poor teacher.
Strikes and demonstrations will continue until the company retracts these unfair dismissals.
Education boards hit for using contract staff as ALTs
Twenty-three municipal boards of education in Osaka Prefecture are suspected of using native English-speaking contract workers as assistant language teachers and placing them under the control of schools, a possible violation of the Temporary Staffing Services Law, an Osaka-based union announced Thursday.
The Osaka Labor Bureau has instructed six municipal boards of education, including those in Takatsuki, Sakai, Hirakata and Higashi-Osaka, to reconsider the practices, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.
A union spokesman said it was legal for the boards to use the contract workers as ALTs as long as they worked at the public schools under the direction of the staffing agencies. But he added that the boards of education had used the temporary workers like dispatch workers, who are under the direct control of schools.
According to the union comprising 550 Japanese and non-Japanese workers, which also provides consultation services for those workers, the 23 municipal boards said they received the contract workers from staffing agencies and let them work at public schools as ALTs, who are required to follow school curriculums and policies.
In January, the union sent questionnaires to all 43 municipal boards of education in the prefecture. Twenty-three said they had used contract workers sent from the agencies as ALTs, the union said.
A 27-year-old teacher who was dispatched to the Hashimoto Municipal Board of Education in Wakayama Prefecture by Zenken said he was given a general orientation about ALTs by the firm before he began working at public schools in the city, adding that he was usually instructed what to do in class by Japanese teachers.
Bigger is not always better for Japan’s English teachers
Different-sized schools pose varied challenges for foreign employees
While exact figures are unavailable, but it is fair to assume that a large number of foreigners who work in Japan will spend at least some of their time teaching in a language school.
But should you lose yourself in the facelessness of a large company, or take a job in what may be little more than a family-run operation where you are the only teacher?
The average salary for language teachers has dropped substantially in the past 10 years, mirroring the downturn in the Japanese economy. A quick scan of the classified ads in newspapers or on one of the many Internet recruitment sites now operating shows that there isn’t a huge variation in the salaries paid at large and small schools.
Full-time teachers can expect to earn between 240,000 yen and 280,000 yen, while part-timers will be looking at an hourly wage of between 2,000 yen and 4,000 yen yen. So if money isn’t the key, what is?
Louis Carlet, deputy general secretary of the National Union of General Workers, ys his organization receives around 600 complaints annually relating to conversation schools, divided equally between large and small companies.
Very few are about the level of pay. Instead, most of the problems are with job and income security, contracts, harassment and evaluations.
“The bigger conversation schools are generally better places to work in terms of job and income security,” says Carlet. So, although the wage levels might not differ between small and large schools, your chances of getting paid might.
The competition among smaller schools is even fiercer than between the big four, meaning they are more likely to have financial problems which may ultimately lead to them going out of business.
None of the teachers I spoke to for this article had ever not been paid, or had worked for a small company which had gone out of business. However bankruptcy is not the only potential pitfall of working in a small school.
One teacher lost her job when she was told it was no longer financially viable to keep her on. This is very unlikely to happen at one of the large language schools. Individual branches may close due to a lack of profitability, but the teachers will simply be transferred to another school rather than being made redundant.
Contracts are another source of dispute between teachers and employers. In most cases, teachers are given one-year contracts which may be renewed depending on the needs of the company and the teacher’s performance over the course of the year.
By doing this, schools are able to categorize teachers as temporary employees, regardless of how long they actually stay with the company. As a result, teachers don’t receive the benefits that they would be eligible for as permanent employees.
The companies claim that this is done because they can’t offer permanent contracts to employees who may only have one year visas, but both the NUGW and teachers feel that this isn’t the case.
In their view, these contracts make it easier for the company to get rid of people if there is a dispute, or if they simply become too expensive to keep on.
Carlet also suggests that the large schools are particularly adept at writing contracts which protect themselves. None of the four biggest schools operating in Japan — Nova, ECC, GEOS and Aeon — would provide comment for this article.
Despite the titles which some companies adopt — “language/culture school,” “academy,” “institute,” “college” — ultimately they are businesses whose main objective is to make a profit.
This is true regardless of the size of the company, the good intentions outlined in its mission statement or the proclamations of educational excellence on its Web site.
As one experienced TEFL professional wearily said, “most places . . . are run by businessmen not language administrators.” All the teachers interviewed for this article viewed the big schools in a similar light to other major companies in the service industry.
“Faceless” was probably the most commonly used adjective in their comments, and more than one person spoke of being little more than a cog in a machine. Given that a recent Japanese magazine article referred to Nova as “the McDonald’s of English language conversation chains,” this attitude is hardly surprising.
On the other hand, smaller schools were generally categorized as having something akin to a family or community atmosphere. One teacher with experience working in both types of school said: “In a small school you play a bigger role . . . You get more say in things like choosing textbooks, deciding what to teach. There are fewer students so you tend to know all of them.”
It would seem that small schools are more convivial places in which to work — you are appreciated, your opinion carries more weight and you have a much larger degree of control over what and how you teach.
But there is a downside. Teachers who worked in small schools often spoke of feeling under more pressure there than in big schools. If a tiny cog in a huge machine breaks down it’s unlikely the whole thing will come to a shuddering halt. That’s not the case when the teacher is the machine.
Another common sentiment was the difficulty in leaving work behind in a small school. Teachers spoke of receiving e-mails and telephone calls from their bosses at unsociable hours and on days off. This rarely happens at large schools unless you are in a management position.
Finally, the family/community atmosphere is great as long as it lasts, but of course that isn’t guaranteed. Disputes, whether professional or personal, can easily crop up in the language teaching industry and in the experience of the teachers I spoke to, these problems were much easier to deal with in large schools.
As one teacher said when talking about small schools, “It’s much harder when you’re working more closely with the person who’s causing you the problem.”
There are many good places to find English-language teaching work in Japan, but unfortunately they seem to be becoming fewer in number.
Louis Carlet says the best thing for teachers to do is to educate themselves as to the minimum standards a contract ought to offer, the limits on what companies can reasonably expect them to do and the legal recourse they have under Japanese law. This is true regardless of the size of the company.
Foreigners march for worker rights
Workers from all parts of the globe battled wind and rain Sunday to give speeches, performances and then trudge through the streets of Shibuya, Tokyo, calling for job security and equality for all.
“This march is about raising people’s awareness about the job situation in Japan, especially for foreigners,” said an American woman dressed as the pink rabbit mascot for Nova, the nation’s biggest chain of English-language schools. “It keeps getting worse and worse, with job contracts and other common problems.
“We want contracts that are more beneficial for employees, not just for companies,” she said, asking to keep her name confidential.
About 300 mainly foreign supporters attended the “March In March,” which was organized by the National Union of General Workers Nambu Foreign Workers Caucus, Kanagawa City Union, Zentoitsu Workers’ Union and Tokyo Occupational Safety and Wealth Center.
“Three main areas are involved in our work,” said Peruvian Augusto Tamanaha, from Kanagawa City Union. “The first is dismissal. It’s too easy for foreigners to get fired for no or poor reasons. Second is salary issues. And third relates to accidents.
“For example, in an accident in the workplace, why do Japanese have one kind of treatment and migrant workers have another?” he asked. “We are fighting to (make employers) obey the law — the Labor (Standard) Law — as migrant people.”
“The most important thing is job security,” said Briton Bob Tench, general secretary of the National Union of General Workers [Tokyo Nambu] Nambu Foreign Workers Caucus. “The vast majority of language teachers are on fixed contracts, which in no way gives job security, because when the year ends there’s the threat that your contract may not be renewed.”
Social insurance and pensions are also equally serious issues, he said. “A lot of foreign workers are not enrolled in ‘shakai hosho’ (social security), which is against the law. It puts people at a great risk of hardship if they suffer from an illness or an accident.”
Students at ‘McEnglish’ schools taste the spit in the burger
“We’re supposed to have 10 minutes between classes, but get none. We’re not allowed to talk to students away from the classroom. We have to move around our building via the emergency exit stairwell,” one former English teacher tells Weekly Playboy. “The pay is 250,000 yen a month. At first I thought it wasn’t bad, but we don’t get a raise or a bonus or paid vacation. There’s a teacher turnover of about 90 percent a year.”
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/waiwai/news/20070227p2g00m0dm005000c.html
Education Minister Slammed For Comparing Human Rights To Fatty Butter
[Amnesty International] slammed Japan’s education minister on Tuesday for comparing human rights to fatty butter and saying too much would give Japan “human rights metabolic syndrome.”
“No matter how nutritious it is, if one ate only butter every single day, one would get metabolic syndrome,” Education Minister Bunmei Ibuki reportedly said at a speech in south Japan on Sunday. “Human rights are important, but if we respect them too much, Japanese society will end up having human rights metabolic syndrome.”
The offending remarks “ignore the human rights of citizens,” Amnesty International said in a letter sent Tuesday to Ibuki and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The group demanded Ibuki retract his remarks.
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070227p2a00m0na029000c.html