Are they ever. Thais will flat out tell you blacks are bad people. They’re black because they were bad in their previous life, and they’re probably still bad now for no other reason than they’re pissed off about being black.
I like that some people’s advice on this is to basically not have an ethical objection to racism if it comes from your boss, because they’re your boss. The OP isn’t about to file a discrimination case but he’s got a pretty good reason to think this case is an example of racism within a culture that is openly racist against blacks. To mentally respond to this with ‘eh, it’s my boss’s business’ would seem to me remarkably self-absorbed.
Except I can’t see anyone saying that.
What I see is the OP making a claim that a coworker is being paid less because they are black. I see no evidence presented to back that up- plenty of guess work but nothing else.
Other posters have said that the boss can pay workers what they like and they don’t need to explain pay scales to anyone.
Again, the OP mentioned she was becoming increasingly frustrated working in her job so it is difficult judge what is the frustration and what is the reality.
I’m always puzzled by what sort of “evidence” people are expecting in a thread like this. Notarized statements? Legal depositions? What? Honestly, what sort of “proof” are you going to get in a text-based message board?
Given how common prejudice is everywhere I think it’s plausible that the OP’s coworker was, indeed, paid less because she’s black. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the OP’s coworkers was paid less due to being a woman, or from a particular country or continent.
I dunno, maybe it makes people feel safer to deny these sorts of things happen in the world.
It’s a reasonable assumption based on some evidence, but as I said, this is not a lawsuit, it’s IMHO and it’s perfectly ok to speculate on what is likely rather than cast iron proof. Also, it may be okay for bosses to pay workers what they like in Taiwan, but in my country and possibly yours unequal pay based on gender is illegal.
Probably slightly more than one persons take on the situation.
However, puzzle on.
Why are people ignoring the fact that April admitted she paid Mary less than everyone else and the reason she gave doesn’t make any sense?
Are ya’ll that desperate to keep your fair world hypothesis intact?
Emphasis mine. You have an extra “s” in there. Perhaps this will color your perception of the situation.
Perhaps you could suggest to the Dope administration that all threads started in MPSIMS should have documented evidence.
If this were America, Mary could file a complaint, and the evidence would be clear cut. She could get a retroactive raise, but good luck finding another English teaching job as a middle-aged Black African. April knows this, which is why Mary gets less money.
I think so. I would never had understood white privilege until I lived in a continent where that didn’t necessarily hold up all the time. Of course, as a white American living in Japan for 25 years and then now in Taiwan, I’m still further up on the totem pole than other foreigners. However, no matter how many years I lived in Japan or live here in Taiwan, I’ll never be anything but a foreigner.
I think that until you face real discrimination, or have people completely unable to look at you as an individual because of race, gender, sexual orientation or other factors do you really start to get a glimpse of what it is like for others who face even more.
I remember talking to my sister way back during the OJ trial. She said she couldn’t understand why there was such a divide between how Blacks and whites perceived the situation. I can totally relate to not believing in a fair world. I would never want to get into a legal issue which depended on a he said / she said because as a foreigner, the presumption of innocence by “the system” is not there.
No, it’s because I’m sexist, remember?
People have a point, I was venting a bit when I wrote the OP, but I don’t see what I would gain by making up stuff against April. It’s not like you (generic) are going to pull your kids out of her school.
I really thought April was really cool for having Mary there. There aren’t that many Africans working in Taiwan and I thought April was progressive. That’s one of the things which sucked.
So can Mary just ask for more pay?
Who said that the world was FAIR?
I think the OPer answered his own question when he admittted that blonde teachers are the image that these schools want to convey. It’s out and out racism, but it’s apparently what the PAYING CUSTOMERS want. So absent evidence to suggest otherwise, it may be numbers that is driving the decision to pay Mary less. Blonde hot thing brings in more students, blonde hot thing gets paid more.
That doesn’t mean that it’s FAIR that Mary has to suffer for an entire culture’s prejudice. It’s not fair. But how does one combat it? Well, you put pressure on the culture to change, and/or you convince legislators to interfere. If you know of a better way, let’s hear it.
FYI, I work for a very respected Fortune 50 company. I make 50-60% of what employees who started with the company 10 or 15 years before me make. We do the exact same job. Well, almost the exact same job. Most of the technical work is dumped into my lap because the older, better paid workers cannot or will not learn Excel, SAP, etc.
I’m paid less because a few years ago, the company decided to lower the max pay for my job classification, and increase by 50% the time between raises. So even though I’m more highly rated than most of them, I’ll never make even close to what they are making. Yes, I could quit, but I know I won’t find a better paying job out there, so I stay.
Of course, I don’t have it so bad because people hired today make less starting out than I did when I started, and the pay freeze is still in effect, so I doubt they’ll ever make close to what I make.
It’s a dog eat dog world out there.
Your boss says to you: “Sorry, PunditLisa. All our clients want nothing but men on their accounts. We gotta give 'em what they want. So we’re going to have to let you go. Buh bye!!!”
You’re telling us you wouldn’t come to MPSIMS and complain about this?
Here’s an idea: People who benefit from the pay differential like the OP should refuse to work at places that racially discriminate. If all those beloved blondes tell their bosses that they won’t work unless everyone is treated the same, then guess what? Maybe the bosses will feel enough pressure to treat everyone fairly.
The relevance of this story to the OP or to Mary’s situation is what, exactly? Because a race and gender-neutral company policy has screwed you over, you think you know what it’s like to be racially discriminated against? You think this makes you qualified to lecture the OP and people like Mary on how to cope with unreasonable and unjust labor practices?
It’s a “dog eat dog world” is not a natural, immutable law. When all we do is allow the dogs to eat one other, it’s not surprising when this is all we see. But it doesn’t have to be that way. History shows us it doesn’t have to be this way. Just a few decades ago, racial discrimination in the US used to be just as blatant. But things have changed since then. There’s no reason to think it can’t change in Asia too.
I post one time, offering you wonderful advice on a great way to succeed at a job and you send me this…
Not even a thank you?
It’s a dog-eat-dog world, but society is typically charged with balancing that so that we can have a competitive market without the imbalances that things like racism create. I would assume that Hong Kong sees real value in it’s people learning English, and a system that values hair color over competency is not a system that is going to lead to great results. Racism actually breaks capitalism by throwing a wrench in how competence and efficiency is rewarded. Societies that systematically exclude a given class of people from upward mobility are not doing themselves any favors.
Some of the stuff I saw go on in China was appalling. You’d see local job ads with height, skin tone, and even bust size written right in to the job description. Some of my students once interviewed for a job overseas, and they were immediately sorted by skin tone for the first cut. People spend millions of dollars on carcinogenic skin bleaching just to stay competitive for ordinary office jobs. Heck, there are even surgeries that you can get that extend your leg by an inch or two. To do that, they break both femurs and you spend most of a year learning to walk again. People aren’t getting this because they just think it’d be nice not to have to use a stepstool. It’s one of the few ways they have to get around systematic discrimination.
Privileging white foreigners also has real societal drawbacks. There are way too many places wehre the right skin color is a ticket to instant credibility- and this isn’t a good thing. To give one example, I had a friend in China who was asked to give some “introductory remarks” at a conference, for which she was given some pocket change. Only later did she learn that she was introduced as an “expert in mining safety” and her speech was translated to endorse a particular product-- which for all she knew could have been faulty or even deadly.And I can’t tell you how many people showed up at my door in Cameroon hoping I (a high school teacher) could diagnose their sick baby, identify if the rock they had was a diamond, or teach them some skill they had no reason to believe I pocessed. The lack of confidence behind that sort of thing is insidious, and it’s bad.
Screw systematic discrimination. People engaging in it should be chastised, and countries that tolerate it should be ridiculed (and the US is somewhere on that scale as well-- but at least we don’t physically sort people into skin tone groups at job interviews.)
Why don’t they hire Americans of Chinese descent? That way they could get a teacher who spoke fluent english and Chinese.
I have been working in China for the past 6 years, and my observation is that the Chinese want a foreign face to teach them English. They do not trust a person with a Chinese face to be able to teach them “real” English.
A few reasons.
One is that Chinese Americans aren’t really seen as Americans. There is no real concept that a foreigner could move to China and “become” Chinese, so likewise there no concept that a Chinese person could go to America and become American. Chinese Americans are considered “overseas Chinese.” So people wanting a “foreign teacher” are going to consider the Chinese American as being in a odd category that doesn’t readily for what they want.
Second is numbers. There are a LOT of foreign English teachers. My tiny town hosted as many as five, and there are a hell of a lot of small towns in China. There just aren’t that many interested Chinese Americans, especially considering that outside of the best schools, the pay isn’t great and there is zero job security. It really is a fast-food model in most cases- bad pay and poor conditions, but jobs are everywhere. They aren’t really going for targeted recruiting.
Finally, speaking Chinese isn’t a huge advantage. Cheap, well-educated local teachers (who are familiar with the all-important testing system) typically handle grammar and anything that requires explanation. Precious foreign teachers primarily teach conversational classes designed to build verbal fluency. The best practice for this kind of class is total immersion- not to speak Chinese at all.
And behind this is a philosophy that foreign teachers are there basically as a bit of a sideshow. Students are warned before classes that foreign teachers are a wacky lot, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Foreign teachers are subtlety advised to keep it fun and lighthearted, and not to make anything too meaty or transformative. Foreign teachers are still seen as slightly dangerous, and thus confined to a pretty limited role.
Well… not anymore. Not openly.
My parents are old enough to remember when skin color could legally be written into US job descriptions, as could gender, age, marital status, religion, ethnic background, and a whole host of things no one would do openly anymore in the US. We’re not that far removed from these things.
“Progressive” in that context might mean employing Africans at all.
It reminds me of my grandmother working as an accountant in St. Louis in the 1920’s. She was paid something like half what the men were, despite doing the exact same work. When she inquired about a raise she was reminded most accounting firms did not hire women at all, so be glad she was working for half pay!
Well isn’t this PunditLisa’s point, that Mary should be happy to get anything?