【Press release】
After 20 years pay freeze and 25% inflation, Teachers at British Council Taiwan unionise to demand fair and decent pay
March 26, 2024
Teachers at British Council Taiwan (BCTW) joined the Taiwan Higher Education Union (T.H.E.U) and formed a branch after 20 years of management ignoring requests to increase salary scales to deal with cost of living increases. In that time teachers have seen the minimum wage almost double and prices in Taipei going up every year while the pay scale stays the same.
BCTW teachers are hugely dedicated to their company and their students, and to being the best teachers they can be. They are among the most highly-qualified and well-trained group of English language teachers in Taiwan. BCTW only accepts teachers with internationally recognised qualifications in language teaching and a minimum of two years of teaching experience; many teachers have decades of experience. To move up the salary scale, BCTW teachers also need to get further masters’ level qualifications in language teaching and undergo a regular system of training and development. Customers are aware of this when they decide to pay student fees that are significantly higher than average.
In good faith, unionised teachers asked that the British Council management team join them for collective bargaining and negotiation on the following points:
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Pay and reward, specifically an adjustment to the salaries and part-time rates to reflect the rising cost of living since 2004, and including compensation for teachers who have reached the top of the scale, and therefore no longer receive any pay rise.
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The requirement that teachers work weekends and evenings without additional compensation. Many teachers have families and the required teaching hours put immense stress on home life, with some teachers barely seeing their children or spouses.
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Breaches of Taiwanese labour law for hourly contract teachers, who have not received the correct amount of annual leave or any sick leave pay, despite repeated requests from the Teachers’ Association over many years.
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Greatly increased workloads since the salary scale was initially set.
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One specific case where a long-standing employee was made redundant without being given his full contractual severance package.
So far, the only remedies management have consented to have been matters required by law: the correction of the severance pay for a former teacher, and honouring its legal obligations to give current part-timers their legally required annual leave and sick leave pay.
However, teachers do not believe that no longer breaking the law is a sufficient standard for the British Council, and they have little faith in yet another management promise of pay reviews. These promises delay real action, and in the past have never yielded results.
Only this week, the British Council Regional director went on record stating that ‘Taiwan had some of the most incredible commercial outcomes … in the [global British Council] network’. Yet management have not fully explored ways to properly compensate people for giving up their family lives and so far they have offered only a tiny, temporary pay increase–barely equal to inflation for just this past year alone.
British Council management refuse to provide historic data about student fees to the union, but we know that fees have increased by at least 35% since 2016. We estimate that student fees go up by roughly 5% each year, and have approximately doubled since the British Council Taiwan was first opened, while teacher salary scales remain unchanged.
BCTW has also become a success story, with what was originally just one teaching centre expanding into three–soon to be four–teaching centres. There are around 2,000 students at the moment, most paying fees that are double the cost of many other English language cram schools in Taipei.
A large proportion of total income is currently net profit that leaves Taiwan to be added to the general company surplus, which is partly used to pay the wages of managers abroad. According to the company’s most recent annual report, 650 staff members working for the British Council globally were earning over 2.4 million NTD a year in 2022-23, up from 531 in 2021-22.
Management are refusing to authorise any long-term pay adjustment or to make any offer that our members can take seriously in light of 20 years of inflation with absolutely no pay rise. We are therefore holding this press conference to encourage management to return to negotiations with a more sincere intention of reaching an agreement. The union will take action if they do not receive offers that the members consider fair and reasonable.
British Council teachers take pride in offering the best English education they can to the citizens of Taiwan, and they know that their students, both adults and children, value their experience, expertise, and care.
All these teachers are asking is that the management team do the same.
【Press Contact】
Taiwan Higher Education Union (THEU)
(02) 2507-7391
[email protected]