So, I followed through on my "threat," and printed and distributed copies of my company's evaluation form, along with a memo to my fellow teachers in Tokai, at our monthly meeting yesterday at the city hall. See, they didn't realize I'm from a HBCU, where you gotta fight for anything you deserve.
A lot of teachers were totally unaware of the shady evaluations and even the fact that their salaries had been penalized because of them. Our own schools didn't know the evaluations they completed affected the foreign teachers' salaries. Shade. My roommate, Aaron, supported my stance, even though he got offered the full raise amount. Richard raised some hell at the meeting too about the salary issue, which totally exposed our company's shade in the presence of the board of education official who always attends our meetings. Our company tried to act like the board of ed. was in on the evaluations, but when the baord official heard our complaints, he said he knew nothing about the evaluations. Ah ha! Busted.
The staffgirl who always attends our meetings looked like she was about to wet her panties when we started getting riled up about the issue. She was really embarrassed we were discussing company politics in front of their client, and tried to divert the matter by telling us to save the complaints about the evaluations for the company office. Us teachers were like, "Been there, done that. So now what's up?" See, that's what happens when you lie to your employees! Once everybody acknowledged the heart of the issue, folks had a lot to say. I said my piece and sat back and watched the fallout. I was shocked to find out that Glenda, a teacher from the Phillipines, was only offered 60% of the maximum raise. Glenda is really sweet and her school loves her to death, so I couldn't possibly fathom why she would have any complaints. It gotta be a C-O-N spiracy.
After the meeting, I got a call from our foreign personnel supervisor, Tomas. Tomas is from Hungary and looks like a semi-pro football player. He's an okay guy but talks quickly, and sometimes very brash, overbearing, almost bully-like even. Although he's a teacher too, I suspect my company hired him as "muscle" to keep the other teachers "in line." On the phone, he came at me shovelling the same old rhetoric, trying to talk me down to get me to submit to and accept the new contract and wack pay raise. I wasn't having it. I broke it down, and told him how it is, how it was, and what it's gonna be like. Ya dig?--Basically, I kicked undisputable facts plus I told him I'd written a memo to the company that gave a review of the meeting I had with my JHS teachers, pleading my case against the wack evaluation I'd received from them, and against the evaluation itself. After I said there wasn't much he could say, but arrange to meet with me to review my memo the next day at the company office.
We met the next day, and to my surprise, Tomas's tune had totally changed. His talk was conciliatory and cooperative, and I was basically offered a new contract with 100% of the raise before I even pulled out a copy of the memo I'd written. Additionally, he informed me that the evaluation forms would no longer be used by the company, and that a new, better one would be drafted. I wasn't sure what had caused the change of heart, but I wasn't gullible enough to believe it was out of goodwill for me. I figured people had been complaining, maybe even threatening to quit. I was even considering jumping ship if they didn't act right. In the end, I signed a new contract with fair pay with no hassle.
Tomas and I talked a bit about other work issues, and I learned something that gave me some perspective on the depth of racism in Japan: some companies don't want to hire "Asian-looking" foreigners as English teachers, simply because some people hold the belief that people of Asian descent can't speak English as well as other ethnic groups. Such is the case even for those Asian-looking people who speak perfect native English. Some schools want only those foreigner teachers who look convincingly different from Japanese people. Wow. That's deep. This made me think of Glenda.
The whole re-signing ordeal reminded me of one thing: Resistance and pressure in the face of injustice does work--on all scales of life, too. However, if working people don't unite and stand up for themselves, they'll forever be taken advantage of by the greed of companies. Especially living in Japan, where non-Japanese have marginal rights, us foreigners, basically, have to come at these companies like "Stop playing and PAY ME!"
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