You are allowed to quote *some *of the article…
Surely Australia has an embassy in Japan? Can’t the stranded workers go there and ask for help to get home?
IIRC, the rules require you to have a round trip ticket when you come, so they probaby have a way back. THAT’S not their problem here.
But what will happen to the argo
Declan
I have friends over there via Nova, and though the situation sucks, they seem to be hanging in there. There have been lots of problems with evictions and nonpayment of salary, though.
I quit working there five years ago, managing a couple of schools and training new staff, and the writing was on the wall even then when I quit: an obsessive drive to open new schools in a stagnant economy meant cutting existing costs, so class sizes were increased and lesson prep time cut, they continued to rely on antiquated {I’m talking 1983} textbooks rather than spend money upgrading, and non-teaching periods went from rare to non-existent.
Course, they couldn’t keep good experienced staff that way, especially with the ungenerous salaries they paid, so they dumbed down the teaching and insisted that it be done straight from a one size fits all manual, a la McDonalds. Morale plummeted, they started haemorrhaging staff, and made up the numbers from FOB college kids who’d only stay for a year or so, which of course meant that teaching standards dropped and they were shedding students like doghairs. Vicious circle, really.
Frankly I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did. Pity: it used to be fun working there back in '96 when I started, and I learned my teaching chops from some fantastic, committed people. They only have themselves to blame, though. I any many others picked their demise - and how to avoid it - way back when we quit.
No, if you’re in Japan on a work permit (which these people most certainly were), you are not required to have a ticket home. In fact, one of the people quoted in the article mentions that he can’t afford a flight home.
I’m applying to the JET Programme, so I wonder if it will be more difficult to get in this year because of this…
I’ve got a number of Japanese friends who are Nova students, and look to be SOL. NOVA would give students large discounts if they purchased long-term contracts, but then as their business went bad, they started to play illegal games to refuse to give the money back.
The result was that earlier this year the government suspended their ability to sell lesson plans which exceeded 6 months. This helped with the downward cycle.
Does anyone know if the teachers are covered by Japanese unemployment laws? If they are, then the teachers can receive unemployment insurance.
What I was told by some friends that are over there is that they could get unemployment if they lost their jobs but NOVA was refusing to let them out of their contracts/fire them. This, while simultaneously still taking the usual salary deductions for rent but not paying the rent (thus getting people evicted), not paying their salaries or paying them exremely late, and continuing to promise payment. (It’s coming, it’s coming!) Essentially, people were getting strung along while NOVA was trying to figure out what to do. One of my friends is out two months’ salary and was getting evicted from her place of living. She was sitting up in 24 hour restaurants and bumming the floor at other friends’ places since she had nowhere else to go at the moment.
They were months behind in nonpayment on some people’s apartments, while still recruiting more and more people to go to Japan. I guess some of these people were allowed to get out of their contract when they found out what was going on, and ended up not going, but some went over and found out too late.
I talked to a friend at length about the situation a couple weeks ago, which was right before NOVA went public and actually said ‘Hey, that’s it’, so at least admitting the state of things and owning up to it is a step forward. I’m not sure about what’s happening in the aftermath, though, as I haven’t had the chance to talk to my friend again, yet.
The other thing that helped hasten this was the fact that word got around. People heard ‘NOVA is going under’ and cancelled their lessons, which meant they had to give refunds, etc to people, also meaning that they had an even harder time paying salaries.
It just makes me glad that I put off trying to go over on one of the English-teaching programs for a few years. This mess isn’t really something I’d want to be stuck in.
If any of my info is incorrect, I apologize, but it’s what I heard firsthand from someone involved in the mess.
I’ve a mate out there who was teaching with them, no idea what he’s up to at the minute, but the thoughts of returning to Northern Ireland are probably enough to make him consider every other option to stay on in Japan.
There have been well-publicized complaints about Nova, from teachers as well as students, for years now. Things really started to implode, however, when the courts started handing down rulings against the company for their deceptive business practices.
“Deceptive” is a charitable term here: the law allows students a seven-day “cooling off” period after they sign a contract with an English school, during which time they can cancel the contract without penalty (the law was enacted because of Nova and other school’s high-pressure sales). Nova would claim the ‘cooling off’ period started when they first gave the student an information packet, not when they signed the contract, and refuse the refund. Nova would also apply completely different hourly rates when calculating refunds (a student would sign up for 100 lessons at 100,000 yen, take 20 and decide to quit. Nova would then pull out a non-existent “single lesson” fee of 5,000 yen and use that to claim the student had taken 100,000 yen worth of lessons and was not due any refund). They would also claim that students could take lessons anytime, but then would have no room available when students showed up after school or work (again, too bad, no refund).
When the courts started ruling that students were indeed due (at least partial) refunds in these cases, that was when the dam broke. Apparently, there were a lot of dissatisfied students who’d been roped into extortionate contracts.
Now the news has just come out that the president (who disappeared a couple of weeks ago) sold off most of his share in the company (going from a 70% to a 20% stake) without filing a report with Japan’s version of the SEC.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20071029p2a00m0na018000c.html
When I was getting ready to come to Japan back in ‘95, Nova was one of the schools I looked at. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but even though I knew nothing about them, something gave me a bad vibe about the company and I avoided it. Once I got here, though, I learned enough from the teachers’ side to know my gut feeling was right.
Don’t worry, I think it’ll be just as difficult as usual 
My husband taught under that program a few years ago. I got the impression that JET’s strict standards and good working conditions led JET applicants to consider Nova and other private schools as their Plan B, and not the other way around. In my opinion, JET’s connection to the Japanese government and local schoolboards make them the best way to go. Good luck!
Like Sublight said, there have been obvious signs that Nova was circling the drain for at least the last couple of years, even longer if you were paying attention. They’ve had dirty hiring and working practices all along, and tried keeping teachers as wage slaves by immediately putting them in debt for initial living set-up costs and locking them in to company housing. That made quitting Nova a difficult prospect for most since they’d be effectively homeless right after quitting and it would take months to pay off the debt incurred by moving in.
The president, Nozomu Hasashi, was fired by the board of directors sometime last week for not showing up to any meetings regarding the problems. Besides the improper transfer of shares, he also appears to have been funneling money into one of his other businesses, Ginganet, by buying equipment from that company at way above the prices Ginganet paid NEC for the same equipment. He had Nova shelling out for a nice executive office and was getting a decent salary while Nova was posting big losses last year.
That’s especially screwed up considering Nova was profitable for a long, long time. According to the article I read in the Japan Times today, the fiscal year ending in March 2006 was Nova’s first loss ever. From all indications, Hasashi is a scumbag who ran Nova into the ground and tried to use the various companies he owned in a shell game to muddy the money trail.
Autolycus, outside language schools have absolutely no bearing on the JET Program. It’s run by the government, and from what I know they don’t even recruit from inside Japan. The poor guys who hadn’t jumped ship before Nova went tits up probably can’t even apply for JET, so it shouldn’t have any affect on your chances of getting in.
To add one more poodle of scumminess to the dogpile we’ve got going here, before Nova stopped paying teachers their salaries, they stopped paying rent to the teachers’ landlords, causing many of them to be evicted from their apartments about the same time their income was cut off. They did not, however, stop deducting the rent payments from the teachers’ salaries.
I know, but I meant that all the people who were thinking about applying for Nova might now apply for JET, making it harder to get in. Maybe I’m totally off base.
Heh. My uncle was a teacher at Nova (or as he referred to it in his blog until recently “Hollywood Upstairs English School”) for five years, up until a few weeks ago when the paychecks started to get really wonky and he tendered his resignation effective immediately.
So I’ve been getting a nice insider view of the whole thing. I don’t know if I’m supposed to link LJs here but if anyone’s really interested I can PM it to you.
He’s currently (as in, right now, I think) en route back to the states. He’s done with Japan for the time being.
What would be wrong with linknig to a LiveJournal?
-FrL-
Yeah, the company accommodation was a major cash cow for the business. They’d lease apartments in a building from the owners at say 80,000 yen a month, then sublet the apartments to 3 teachers at 60-70,000 yen per month each: profit! It kinda made sense if you were in the country for less than a year or so, since you didn’t have to pay key money or shell out for furniture, but basically you were getting ripped off, since you could land your own place for only a shade more than you were paying to share, if you knew where to look. Me, I was never dumb enough to have my employer as my landlord.
One of the first pieces of advice I was given when I first started teaching there was that if your salary was ever even a day late, walk away, preferably with everything you can carry: Nova’s only the latest and largest in a long line of ESL school bancruptcies there. The industry’s never quite lost its mid-80’s cowboy attitudes.