EF's recruitment and retention strategy for foreign employees is essentially a human trafficking scheme with a friendly face that avoids anything overtly illegal. The experience at EF fits in the United Nations definition for human trafficking as people are recruited through deception and once in the position of vulnerability in a foreign country are maintained through coercion and abuse of power. Despite exploitation, consent to remain at the job is achieved through direct and indirect threats and deception with the knowledge that the foreign employee is unfamiliar with the local legal system and would not be able to seek help from authorities. Additionally, while foreign employees are free to leave the job anytime, they are deceived into believing that this would likely result in having to permanently leave the country that they have committed to living in. An option that for many is not feasible.
The lies start with the recruiters who will give a job offer to anyone meeting the minimum government requirements for the visa, and make whatever promises needed for the employee to sign the contract. Everything seems professional, friendly and polished up until the moment the employees arrive in the country. At that point, the lies, mismanagement and incompetence start to be revealed. Within a day upon arrival, the employees are rounded up and given massive byzantine contracts to sign while still disorientated and jet lagged. Confusion and questions about promises and realities are either dismissed as recent changes in national law or company policy or just ignored. The company commits a great deal of effort to polishing its reputation to recruit new employees but once they begin working it seems everything possible is done to drive them away and ensure a miserable life on the job.
Once the employee begins work at their assigned training centre, the situation on the job never ceases to seek new lows. Unbelievable incompetence is widespread among the management and staff. Rules and policies are made up on the spot by the administration, so the situation at each school location varies wildly. Despite the vast differences in working conditions at each centre, the policies are always claimed to be due to national employment law or corporate policy. The working schedule is with work on nights and weekends on top of long hours preventing any healthy work-life balance or slightest pretence of a life outside of work. Employees are required to work 9 to 10 hours a day and sometimes six days a week. In my case sometimes I worked 45 to 50 hours a week, and the overtime work beyond the 40 hours a week agreed in the contract was completely unpaid. When this issue was brought up, it was framed as a problem with the employee being unable to complete their required tasks rather than a management issue. Scheduled daily tasks include so much busy work and embarrassing drudgery that there was little time left for the actual job: preparing for and teaching classes.
The company puts a tremendous effort into making the learning centres appear visually clean and impressive, but the actual conditions of the facilities are deplorable. Rats, roaches, mould, shoddy construction, and safety hazards abound. Some centres in first-tier cities don't even have proper restrooms with modern toilets. Even air conditioning was inadequate, and at one centre I worked at the a/c was turned off in the peak of summer heat during the busiest times of day assumably to save money. The teachers then were forced to work in sweatshop conditions, crammed into tiny, hot, unventilated rooms with many students. The technology provided, specifically the computers were continually inoperable, and the IT staff tasked with maintaining and repairing this technology were utterly unable to ensure the most basic functionality.
While employed at the company for less than one year, I either personally witnessed or was directly aware of incidences of physical assault, sexual harassment, workplace safety violations, employment law violations and other horrors. When any of these issues or complaints about the facilities or working conditions were brought to management attention, it only became another opportunity for management to engage in power play antics against the complaining employee and nothing satisfactory was ever done to address the issues.
It's almost laughable that one can immediately observe that Orwellian concepts are baked into the EF corporate culture. “Doublethink” is widely practised with management and complacent staff commonly expressing beliefs that they know conflict with reality. Meanwhile, employees working in deplorable conditions are expected never to express the slightest dissatisfaction which would reveal them as non-compliant “thoughtcriminals.” EF encourages employees to use their personal social media account to post unpaid company advertisements and enforces this activity via peer pressure. Parties and events are listed as “benefits”, yet these are actually required work and another form of physical and psychological control over the staff. Activities at these events emanate a cult-like aura with employees forced to perform song and dance like clowns, and despite the bizarre nature of these activities, peer pressure ensures most people follow along. The foreign teachers are often paraded like circus animals as a form of humiliation and subjugation in the presence of hundreds of people. Employees who refuse to attend such events are punished by having pay withheld or annual leave days revoked.
Annual leave, like the other benefits that look impressive on recruiting material, was a joke. Compared to other jobs in the industry which provide adequate time off, the 10 days a year promised can hardly appeal to the majority of the target demographic willing to relocate to the other side of the planet for a TEFL job. Even worse, most employees were only permitted to take time off in small fragments on days selected by the centre management, preventing even a trip back to their home country to see their family. Other benefits such as health insurance were equally useless and provided just for appearances and in reality not usable for either routine or significant medical issues. Lastly, the pay is far below the industry standards for the amount of work required especially since housing is not provided. The recruiters offer a false impression about the low cost of living to make the corresponding low pay seem tolerable when in reality most employees will need to pull money from saving for months to survive. An apartment agent is provided, but the agent and the owners of the flats are all in consortium with EF. The properties are rented out at prices sometimes double or triple the market rate, and the recruits are deceived into believing these are the cheapest and only apartments available in the city. With only a few days to decide they have little choice but to sign a rental contract subjugating them to a year of grossly overpaying for housing. Additionally, EF instructs the landlords to force the employees to pay rental tax, something that is strictly the landlord's responsibility.
In summary, EF is infamous as being one of the worst large-scale employers in the TEFL industry in Asia. Nearly every aspect of the job experience is deplorable, and while many of these issues are well known in the company, no effort is made to improve them. It should be noted that while it is possible for people not to encounter or not be bothered by the experiences described above, and therefore have a positive experience, EF uses various methods to coerce or entice employees into leaving a positive review. During my time an email was sent out encouraging employees to leave a review on Glassdoor and send in a screenshot to receive a prize.
