Bill Templer: Within a Widening Gyre: Reflections on Remuneration and Equity

This article is published with the permission of the author and GISIG,  in whose  newsletter is first appeared.

[For more information on GISIG - Discussion list of the Global (World)Issues Special Interest Group (GISIG) of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL). - go to: http://www.gisig@Yahoogroups.com ]

Dennis Newson
EFLTU Chair
30 September 2005

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Bill Templer
Rajamangala University of Technology Srivijaya
Sikao district, Trang province, Thailand 92150
[published in IATEFL GISIG Newsletter 17 (2005), 22-28]

Within a Widening Gyre: Reflections on Remuneration and Equity

The profession needs to begin to critically discuss an alarming phenomenon: the pay differentials that are spreading across the field of TESOL between ex-pats working in a given country and the local teachers. We need to interrogate the growing privileges and, by local standards, sometimes grossly inflated salaries some TESOLers are ever more convinced they should rightfully ‘command’  as an entitlement when teaching in the Global South, Eastern Europe and many other ‘low-income’ economies, or in the oil-rich Gulf.   In this brief paper, China, Bulgaria and Thailand serve in part as an illustration.

The broader frame for these comments is the need to strive for equity, in the profession, in our world  -- how to advance from an economics of competition and greed in the profession (and wider society) to an economics of equitable cooperation, and an ELT community of practice that is more democratic and sustainable. We need to build a TESOL of solidarity  with the great masses of people, our students and local colleagues, in the countries and institutions where we work [1].

The current ‘industrialization’ of EFL is exacerbating this trend, as it spreads conjunct with neo-liberal globalization and its economic agendas [2].  Are some of us in a sense becoming an elite class of ‘economic migrants,’ gravitating to exotic job environments with an excessive salary by local standards (even tax-free) -- and armed at times with minimal qualifications, like the 4-week certificate offered by the American Language Institute [3]? A recent ad in Sri Lanka for teacher trainers even stressed: “USD 850 per month (normal salary for a local in the same position is around USD 350)”  ( http://www.tefl.com/jobs/job.html?jo_id=17361 ). Can we discern a phenomenon on the rise: EFL carpetbagging in Asia and Eastern Europe? A harsh judgment --  but one to ponder in this age of mass labor migration, where the ‘native’ ability to teach EFL is in exceptionally high market demand.

As Newsweek International  noted in a recent Pollyanna feature article:  “More than 400 foreign English-teaching companies are trying to break into China. On a visit to Beijing last week, British Chancellor Gordon Brown said the Chinese thirst to acquire the language was ‘a huge opportunity for Britain,’  which already boasts a 1.3 billion pound English-teaching industry. Says [linguist Jennifer] Jenkins, ‘Owning English is very big business’” [4].

Inside TESOL, this configuration in remuneration is a ‘junior’ version of a broader trend in ‘development aid,’ visible in the U. N., in numerous international NGOs, of foreigners drawing ‘Western salaries’ and able to live in huge houses with domestic servants in the Two-Thirds World [5], their life-styles a conspicuous flaunting of privilege. Locals often living literally on the edge find this phenomenon of overpaid ‘aid workers’ abhorrent, imperial.

My own emblematic instance for this is a German ‘technical aid’ expert renting a small palace in Vientiane for USD 1,300 a month, where the police sergeant outside on the beat takes home the monthly Lao kip equivalent of USD 20, and most staff the expert consults with at the National University of Laos not much more.

The Widening Divide

One ‘material’ issue worth scrutiny inside the political economy of TEFL (see below) is gross pay differentials in teaching English (and other languages) between foreigners and local teachers in a specific given country or school (maybe even your own). This is the product of the intrusion of '‘experts' either placed from abroad by a program. Or hired on local contract  on a separate pay scale exceeding that for local teachers, the product of a conjunction where local ministries under constraints of the EFL ‘market’ are pushed into ‘marketing’ their own academic turf through special salaries and benefits.

My core thesis here is that this is a form of neo-colonialism. The now still dominant world system may be turbo-driven by greed, inequality and injustice, what Hugo Chavez has called “savage neoliberal capitalism.”  But that need not be enshrined as a professional ‘ethos’ in our own garden, in effect ‘normalized’ or ‘naturalized.’ We need to strive for a more democratic and just profession. Most people across the world work at local salaries.  Why can’t we? And pay local taxes. Everywhere.

It is ‘neo-colonial’ to go to a poor country as a foreigner to make money from that country’s very lack of ‘development.’ That of course remains one of the compromising contradictions of all participation in ‘development,’ in which TEFL emerges as a key cog. Not only do we reproduce, serve and create local elites through our teaching, we ourselves may become part of a  ‘foreign expert’ elite, the complex dynamic topography of elitism that accompanies or even stalks this profession.

Perhaps even an old ’racist’ dimension of  colonialism is being reproduced today as a kind of epiphenomenon of EFL expansion, in that few if any BANA TESOLers are ‘people of color.’  Especially in East Asia. To a bizarre extent, except for colleagues from South Asia, EFL is in part reconfiguring a kind of ‘white man’s burden’ in our own space & time, reproducing racialized power relations in the professional workplace [6]. There is a complex entanglement of ‘white subjectivity,’ race, class, gender and  sexual orientation as axes of privilege underlying our social practice in TESOL, as elsewhere, but that is a topic for another day. Such professional social practices legitimize and naturalize structures and values. Pierre Bourdieu argues that social reproduction operates subliminally by design,  precisely because individuals are unaware of the broader meanings of their dispositions, habits and practices [7].

EFL’s Political Economy

This question is embedded in a broader frame:  the political economy of EFL and the EFL industry in its present age of capitalism’s hyper-expansion. That political economy remains under-researched, and encompasses a host of questions centering on Capital & language learning: who profits from ESL, who pays, who finances? What is the real financial burden imposed on the have-nots in the Global South to learn the language of the haves and the mobile modernizing elite? Never in human history have so many of the world’s poor spent so much time and money  to learn the language of the planet’s privileged.

What was the full gross expenditure on learning English in Thailand last year? In Moldova? In Nepal? That is impossible to answer. How can such social and individual costs be calculated? Who is footing that bill, whose benefit accrues directly to the countries where English is native? All native speakers profit from their subject position of ‘native’ proficiency in the language they teach.  That native knowledge is a source of ENLP (English as a Native Language Privilege) [8] and itself a ‘natural’ and ’embodied’ (like ‘skin color,’ rather than laboriously acquired) form of socio-cultural capital at our direct disposal as teachers [9]. Another key question in this political economy of EFL reticulates into a major global issue facing TESOL:  how does the possession of EFL proficiency skills -- as the linguistic cultural capital we impart and certify -- widen the gap between poor and  less poor? Are we in a profession contributing in effect to the reproduction of social inequity? Are we its agents?

TESOL’s Moral Dilemmas

Is this institutionalized pay differential ethically defensible? Is it fair to local teachers? Consider the asymmetry of pay difference of three, five, ten, even 15 to 30 times between local teacher X and foreign teacher Y (same ‘rank,’ in the same office, with the same students)? What is its ‘ethnography’: how do local local fellow teachers view such differentials? How is this seen by the students, their parents, the communities we work and live in? How do we TESOLers -- and teachers of German or French --  hired into privileged positions far better paid than their closest colleagues (who are often  academically more ‘qualified’) see ourselves and this inequity?

My sub-thesis is that reflective teaching should also include such self-reflection on your own situation and its ‘aporias,’ irresolvable contradictions.  And empirical research needs to give us a better picture of the realities of this dimension of TEFL’s political economy. I’ve been confronted with that problematic in a variety of situations on two TEFL peripheries, Southeastern  Europe and East Asia, and will draw on that in remarks below.

Tiering and an Architecture of Privilege

In countries like Thailand,  the same institution in tertiary education may pay foreign teachers on one salary scale and local teachers on another, while offering a mini-package of certain special ‘perks’ to foreign teachers.  Foreign EFL teachers (some with minimal qualifications beyond a B.A. in any field) are on a scale that is set in Bangkok at 3x the base pay of a beginning instructor (8000 baht = USD 200 a month). Some universities and other government schools are, by administrative maneuvering, able to elude the constraints of this ‘standard package’ and pay in the range of $440 a month. Or by similar loopholes, as at Prince of Songkhla University in Phuket, offer salaries in the $800 range.

Meanwhile, even highly experienced senior Thai colleagues remain in the USD 250-400 range almost everywhere. Thai minimum wage is around 180 baht a day, ca. $4.50. Many  working-class Thai, including the parents of most of my students at a non-elite provincial campus, are employed in rubber plantation work, paddy farmers or fishermen. They  may take home little more than about USD 120 a month.  Ask yourself: how much more do you make than the parents of the kids you are teaching? And why?  A sobering question. If in the Global South or on Europe’s eastern periphery, how much more than your local colleague at the next desk?

Ex-pat TESOLers in Thailand tend to receive cost-free basic housing or a housing allowance that in the standard government package is equivalent to $200 a month. Yet that housing allowance alone is the entire salary of some of the younger Thai academics at my own institution. They receive no housing allowance.  Why should privileged we? In many smaller Thai towns, a very comfortable house can be rented for $50-80 a month. Of course not in Bangkok, not in Chiang Mai. But is a housing allowance necessary? Or just an other sweetener to lure foreigners having come to expect ‘perks’ to a job here? Thai institutions normally do not cover air fare. Yet in China, elsewhere in East Asia and on the Gulf, such extras have also come to be considered ‘standard privileges.’  Why? Why should migrant academics from wealthy countries be paid their round-trip air fare to work elsewhere?

Meanwhile: in Nepal, there are virtually no ex-pat TESOLers on local contract, though badly needed. Kathmandu University may soon launch a TESOL M.A., and needs some ex-pat staff.  Who will work for $140 a month, or less? The new university in Luang Prabang in Laos has no non-Lao teachers, and is in urgent need of them. The university cannot even offer foreigners the local salary of $24 a month. Jordan requires more qualified EFL ex-pats, at the new university in Ma’an and elsewhere. But why ‘settle for’ a meager Jordanian or Syrian salary when Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia beckon?

In the PRC, many 'native speakers' are making on average the RMB equivalent of USD 350-600 a month (http://www.anesl.com/schools/index.asp ), and in some corners can expect salaries in the range of $800, such as at the expanding language school AES, which advertises regularly on www.tefl.com --- far in excess of pay scales for local Chinese teachers, even full professors. On the Gulf, one of the most lucrative and pro-actively marketed sectors for EFL hiring, a key local professional  told me he feels foreign TESOLers are literally stealing the jobs from Arab teachers, another *separate question* in this political economy. To what extent are we indeed reducing job opportunities for locals? That needs to be researched in a slew of case studies.

Private local education is another corner of this complex. Salaries there may be several times the going rates in public education. In my own province in the Thai far south, the best paid ex-pat EFL teachers are at private language schools that cater to the children and young adults of a certain upwardly mobile Thai class. The ethical dimension: should we sign on to contracts at private schools that charge high tuition, unaffordable for the masses and their children in a given country? If you make a far higher than local salary at a private language school (say $750 in provincial Thailand), it is because the parents can afford to pay the locally exorbitant tuition fees. This is the reproduction of elitism and inequality I alluded to earlier. In Thailand, such private schools have created what is rapidly becoming a two-tier educational system, deepening the social divide under neo-liberalism Siam style between the Thai masses and a small Western-oriented modernizing ‘comprador’ elite. Teachers know and repress this knowledge.

Balkan Aporias

One reason so few TESOLers venture to a country like Bulgaria is that salaries for foreign ‘experts’ in secondary and tertiary education are basically the same as for Bulgarians, around 120-150 Euros a month or less. And the Sofia authorities have made obtaining a work permit  a major and comparatively costly steeplechase (in 1992 it was much easier). This is one reason why you almost never see an ad on any TESOL job board for Bulgaria. Or the Ukraine, Serbia,  Moldova. Or Romania.

Unless of course you are sent in by the British Council. Consider this plum: a current British Council recruitment drive in Bulgaria for native-speaker staffing at the English language unit at the Kozloduy nuclear reactor on the Danube near the tiny impoverished town of Nikopol. The pay scale at this upscale nuclear enclave being offered by BC (1,639 to 2,273 levs a month = 1,200 to 1,700 USD) is 9-14 x (!) more than most high schools and many university EFL teachers are making in BG. They top this off with another 325 GBP in Sterling monthly, plus GBP 2000 as a bonus at the end of one year, plus travel and baggage allowance (1,200 GBP),  free fully furnished flat with paid utilities, cell phone provided (see http://www.tefl.com/jobs/job.html?jo_id=17338 if still accessible; or consult BC Sofia website).

One wonders who is footing this bill: the Bulgarian government, the UK taxpayer, the EU? With placement here inside a fully Bulgarian, high-security institution. Of course, Kozloduy is something special, a potential Chernobyl in the eyes of the EU, watchdogging it at Europe’s ‘periphery’ with a kind of super-surveillance from the oligarchic ’core.’ The professionalism of the Kozloduy staff, and their ability to communicate with EU ‘inspectors’, is crucial.  Several years ago, Bulgarian EFL specialists were teaching at Kozloduy, at far lower salaries. The BC in Bulgaria is very pro-active in working with the ‘needs’ of the Bulgarian military (PEP program) and now, it would seem, the Bulgarian nuclear industry as well. But the priorities of the BC are a separate issue worth discussing in another time and space.  The seasoned local English teachers at the ramshackle high school in Nikopol down the road are taking home around a tenth of the rock bottom in levs offered a foreigner  with ‘two years experience’  and, if nothing else,  a CELTA  ‘30-day wonder’ certificate. Moreover, creating such lavish conditions damages the entire environment for local foreign recruitment in Bulgaria, since no institution can compete with Kozloduy’s magnetic benefits.

Deutsch als Fremdsprache

It’s not just EFL of course. Look further afield at a dwarfed but still vital language of wider communication, German. The DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) places teachers of German in universities in Eastern Europe and the Global South where they make  up to 4,000 Euros a month -- while their immediate colleagues get 130 Euros a month, even less. In the case of the National University of Laos, six Lao staff members teaching German (one with a PhD from Leipzig) are barely surviving on $25-$35 a month, the longer-term DAAD ‘expert’ may be raking in more than 3,500 Euros (it’s a ‘hardship’ post).

In Bulgaria, DAAD experts with an M.A. teaching German at  some four universities earn salaries in the range of 3,000 Euros a month while their Bulgarian colleagues (some with PhD & numerous publications) can expect maybe 140 Euros a month. A German teaching at a high school many years in my Bulgarian town, placed by a German organization, received a similar salary, saving almost everything over 5 years. He admitted to me he’d come to penurious Bulgaria to 'make good money' and ‘cash in,’ nest-egging for an uncertain future back in Deutschland.  Like the TESOLers flocking to Qatar and Kuwait. But  in an utterly down-and-out peripheralized country like Bulgaria (or Romania) today, these tales are almost Gothick in their grotesquerie.

Of course, such funding is a form of ‘linguistic’ development aid from Berlin or London. But it shapes real everyday working conditions and the textures of social praxis, implanting egregious asymmetries in remuneration reminiscent of the colonial era. It’s one thing to be employed at a BC center or Goethe Institute in Bangkok or Sofia, which are institutional islands or pods in a foreign economy and its ecology of language learning. It’s another to be placed inside the very structure of a foreign educational system as a guest yet full-time staff member. On a day-to-day basis, it may taste a lot like colonial insertion.  And is certainly resented by local  teachers of language and other subjects. For starters, as mentioned, we need a more empirically grounded picture of that ill feeling, for some an affront to their own professional dignity.

I have not dealt here with the counter-arguments regarding why such ’perks’ are necessary to induce foreigners to come. Would any teachers apply to the PRC if the largesse dried up? Who can ‘afford’ to work as EFLers in low-income, poorly resource’d economies? I think we could have a spirited panel or journal discussion on that. Maybe some of the same people who become ‘volunteers.’ But why volunteerism in TESOL?  We need professional appointments at local scales.

On a more personal note:  I worked in Bulgarian higher ed 12 years. Over the years, I met a few other Americans and Scots in my general boat, ready to work for whatever Bulgarian academics earn.  At one point in the spring of 1997 that dropped to an equivalent of  USD 18 a month.

Let me suggest that reflection on this complex of questions – and especially the role of high-cost private education in generating social inequality across the (mis)developing Two-Thirds World -- needs to be part of a TESOLer’s toolkit for self-reinvention. It can be thematized in workshops at  conferences. Particularly in the Global South and ex-Soviet East  where these issues are an everyday reality of the language-teaching landscape. And incorporated into training, say in critical units on TEFL’s political economy.

Diagnosis is one thing, remedy another

How can we interrupt this cycle of inequity and unwarranted privilege? Let BC or DAAD or the U.S. Department of State offer a ‘competitive local salary.’ Competitive means maybe at the slightly higher rungs of the local pay pyramid. Is that possible? Scales analogous to volunteer-oriented alternatives like the Peace Corps or VSO spring to mind. Fulbright is another node in this typology, more complex. A  Fulbrighter in Russia, the Ukraine, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria or Mongolia may make 10-15 x as much as her colleagues, saving most of it. By contrast, in Finland or Germany, the stipend may seem even too little. Why not a pay scale calibrated to the specific economy an ‘expert’ is placed in? Plus a few modest perks.   Encourage new modalities and ethical guidelines for equitable local hiring as part of a broader transformative project of a truly democratic People’s English [10]. Aid more hands-on in the development of national  EFL teachers’ organizations in the Two-Thirds World that better empower local teachers -- and assist those from abroad interested in finding a local job.

In that vein, TESOL Inc. is launching a new initiative “encouraging local affiliates in the U.S. to establish sister relationships with TESOL organizations in developing nations and sponsoring reduced rate regional conferences,” part of their concern in “reaching out and bringing our peers in developing countries into our community--better communication, better support, and one hopes eventually, better recognition for the efforts of all TEFL instructors” [11].

References

1. For some ideas on to develop such hands-on solidarity with students, see Ira Shor, Empowering Education, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992.

2. Muhammad Raji Zughoul, “Globalization and EFL/ESL Pedagogy
in the Arab World,” Journal of Language and Learning 1 (2),106-146, 2003, http://www.shakespeare.uk.net/journal/jllearn/1_2/zughoul.html ; Mark Warschauer, “The Changing Global Economy and the Future of English Teaching,” TESOL Quarterly, 2000, http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw/global.html . See also the insightful paper Gregory Hadley, “ELT and the New World Order: Nation-Building or Neo-colonial Reconstruction?,” http://www.tesolislamia.org/articles/hadley.pdf .

3.  See http://www.americanlanguage.org/amtefl.html  Its price tag: $2,500.

4. “Not the Queen’s English,”  Newsweek International, March 7,   http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7038031/site/newsweek

5.  On the Two-Thirds World and some pedagogical alternatives, see Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, Escaping Education. Living as Learning Within Grassroots Cultures, New York: Peter Lang,1998.

6.  On racism and ‘whiteness’ as a subject position of ‘embodied privilege’ more generally, see the articles on ‘critical whiteness theory’ in borderlands e-journal,  3(2), 2004, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol3no2.html .

7.   Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: CUP, 1977, p. 79.

8.  Bill Templer, “The political economy of TEFL: A levy on English as a native language privilege,” TESOL Matters, 12 (3), 2002, http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/sec_document.asp?CID=193&DID=944

9.  Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale: Pluto Press,1998, pp. 55-67.

10.  Democratizing the rush to EIL might also include new revamped forms of Ogden’s BASIC ENGLISH, for which there is a crying need among the world’s masses today, and is well worth serious reconsideration as a simplified readily learnable ‘auxiliary language’ to standard globablizing English. See Barbara Seidlhofer, “The shape of things to come? Some basic questions about English as a lingua franca,” in: K. Knapp & C. Meierkord (eds.), Lingua Franca Communication, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2002, pp. 269-302, esp. 277-295.  Seidlhofer notes that “Basic, whatever its shortcomings in practice, is highly significant as a stimulus for thought” (295).

11. Personal communication (and also on a TESL listserv) from a member of the TESOL Board of Directors, 27 Feb 2005.