Payday Paranoia

Payday Paranoia
Aug 20, 2009 By Jessica A. Larson-Wang, www , eChinacities.com

Special Topic: Finding and Keeping Jobs in China

Every month when payday rolls around, and particularly around holidays when I should be getting paid leave, I get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I know that this feeling isn’t rational, as I have a good, stable job. I’m on a contract, and I have not once been given any reason to doubt my employer. They have paid me on time, the correct amount, every month, for over a year. I was happy enough with them that I extended my contract for another year, and I have a good relationship with my boss. So why is it that I still have this feeling of dread around payday, this unshakeable feeling that some terrible calamity is surely about to befall me and my family?


Photo: gotplaid?

Chalk it up to experience, I suppose. Expats working in China, aside from those lucky enough to be working with rather solid international firms, are probably used to the rather unstable nature of work in China. English teaching, in particular, is notoriously unreliable, and the field is rife with stories of teachers being fired without warning, of salaries being docked, of schools going under, of pay being late. These sorts of occurrences are, of course, unacceptable, but chances are that anyone with any significant work history here will have had to swallow at least one bitter pill over the years, to cut his or her losses, or to move on from a bad situation with a bad taste in their mouth.

I started working in China in 2003, which gives me 6, going on 7 years of experience in this country. My first job was with a university, a big and famous university in Kunming. The pay was pathetically low, as was the norm for university work in that area at that time. And yet, I enjoyed my job and I didn’t complain about the pay, since I knew what I was getting myself into when I took the job in the first place. At the end of my contract, I decided to move on, and turned my passport over to my Foreign Affairs Officer so that he could convert my expiring residence permit to a tourist visa in order to give me an extra month to get my affairs sorted. When I went to pick up my visa, however, the FAO claimed that he’d overpaid me for the last month, and that since we had not worked a full month, he should not have paid me a full salary. Of course this was ridiculous, since nothing was stated in the contract about pro-rating the last month’s salary, and I’d already been paid, and the paltry sum had already been spent. Still, the man demanded I give him over a thousand RMB, or else he would not give back my passport. Getting desperate, I pitched a bit of a fit right there in the office, attracting the attention of the FAO’s boss, who called me into his office, asked what the issue was, told me there was no question of me returning any money to the school, left the room, came back with my passport and an apology. I later learned that this FAO had eventually been fired for (what else but) embezzling school funds in a rather ingenious scheme that involved taking the TVs from the foreign teachers’ apartments and replacing them on the grounds that they were “broken” and then selling the “broken” TVs for his own profit.

This was only the first of many questionable experiences, and even that story had a relatively happy ending, even if it did serve to teach me a lesson about working in China. As you can imagine, in six years it is possible to accumulate a lot of horror stories, and my stories are tame compared to some others that I’ve heard, and, in all honestly, extremely tame compared to what many Chinese workers have to put up with from their bosses and employers. This isn’t to say, however (lest I be accused of being unfair to the good employers of China), that I’ve never had a good experience working here, or that the good doesn’t outweigh the bad, but simply that the bad experiences tend to leave a rather deeper impression than the good. If one reads expat forums

on the internet, particularly forums related to working in China, it is very easy to get the impression that there are simply no good employers here and that you’d be nuts to accept a job in this country, that surely in doing so you’d be setting yourself up for misery. The truth of the matter is that good jobs are a bit like good relationships, they are not easy to find and not easy to maintain, and it takes some experience in this country to be able to tell a good situation from a bad situation. It is also true that the more desperate you are for work, the easier it is to find yourself in a mess.

The fact of the matter is that we are all, no matter what we are doing here, working away from our homes in a society where the rules are different. We often come into situations with expectations that are rather unrealistic by local standards – we expect high pay, reasonable hours, accommodation that is up to Western standards, and, most of all, we expect our superiors to be reasonable people with whom we can have an open dialogue and sharing of ideas. Chinese workers, for the most part, take what they can get, do what the boss says, work uncomplainingly, and eventually, when the situation gets unbearable, simply quit. My husband worked for four years at a large company never knowing, month to month, when exactly payday was. It was supposedly on “around” the fifth of each month, but sometimes it would be the fifteenth, sometimes the first. The Chinese workers for the school that I worked at in Kunming would routinely work overtime without pay and go without lunch, but if they were even a minute late, they’d lose one hundred RMB from their 1000RMB a month salary. Foreigners would be irate at either one of those situations, but many Chinese employees take those sorts of things in stride. Perhaps the problems arise when people from one country apply their own cultural expectations to people of another culture – when Chinese employers expect foreign workers to have a more Chinese attitude about their work, and foreigners expect foreign attitudes from Chinese bosses.
 

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2 Comments

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fritz

I would rather say.. Chinese are underpaid. Bear in mind in the West we get at least 3 times more than in China. I dont include myself here i earn 1000 RMB a month by own choice. Education is a gifted job and i recieve my rewards in different ways, here and in other countries i worked before.

May 30, 2011 15:26 Report Abuse

fritz

i am from a western country. And happy in what I do my heart is in it not greed like many in the teaching profession

May 31, 2011 15:15 Report Abuse