By Korean law, an employer MUST pay one month's severance pay to the employee after a one year contract has been completed. NEVER, NEVER accept a contract 10 months long, 11 months long, or 11 months and 3 weeks (and six days) long! The contract must be one complete year in order to receive the one month's severance pay.

Alright! Yeah, I'd love you to put this in your web-page. Thanks! Maybe when i get to Japan and have a definitive answer on severance pay i can add more to what I wrote in the original posting.

Thanks again,

Below I have summarized my Korean horror story. I hope someone can learn from it.

After completing my MA TESOL in December 1995 I accepted employment at Kyonggi University, in Suwon, Korea. The contract, which seemed legitimate, was to last from March 1996 to March '97. Considering that KU was courting my alma mater, (Michigan State University) for sisterhood; that I was recommended by my former boss, a famous Korean academic; and that I was interviewed by a professor from KU who was a visiting professor at MSU; I felt safe disregarding all the warnings I'd heard about teaching in Korea.

The first year was fine. The job was challenging, if not rewarding. I worked hard and by all accounts did very well.

In October I decided that I wanted to stay on another year and asked for a new contract. No answer. I asked again in November. Before leaving for winter vacation in mid-December, I learned that the university was hiring several new teachers. They were to be offered significantly reduced terms from my old contract. I told the department chair explicitly that I didn't want to get the same terms that the new teachers were being offered.

"Don't worry," he said, "These changes effect only the newcomers."

Foolishly I believed him. I went back to the States, thus, uncontracted. When I e-mailed my roommate, a Canadian, he assured me that everything was fine, that he had spoken with the department, that I was on the schedule and that the contract would be the same as last year. I called another Prof. in the department, the Korean/foreigner liaison. He said that he had seen my new contract. He said it would be the same as last year's, with a small raise, and that I could get it here in Korea.

So, a few days after arriving and less than a week before my '96/97 visa expired, the day came for me to sign the new contract. Far from a pay raise, I was given what amounts to a $5,000 annual pay cut. They raised the required work hours so I would lose several hundred dollars/month in mandatory-overtime pay and, more importantly, shortened the contract to 11 months. This change enables them to dodge the Korean labor law which requires all employers to pay workers one month's salary for every year worked. The aforementioned liason admitted at an informal staff meeting that contracts were shortened for exactly that reason: they don't want to pay severance pay.

Those are the facts. The underlying issues which bother me are:

*They lied for five months.
*This is an ongoing theme in Korean foreign teacher relations.
*In signing the contract I felt that I was condoning their xenophobic, manipulative labor practices.
*They openly dodged their own government's laws
*The university did this to all the foreign staff, including two Profs with over 7 years of seniority.

Fortunately I managed to get a job elsewhere and am leaving in a week.

--Timothy D. Cupp