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There
have been a series of incidents where schools postponed paying
teachers their final pay and severance until the last
day
of school. In fact, some schools even hold-off until teachers
have returned to their country of origin to transfer funds.
This practice has lead some teachers to never receive their money.
In other words, the school stalls until it's too late for teachers
to
have any recourse.
Some schools purposely mislead teachers, telling them they must give up their visa at an early date. In the UAE, and other Gulf nations, when you surrender your visa you also sign a document saying you have been paid in full and owed nothing by your employer. How convenient for the schools--you signed that you have been paid when in fact you have not! Our
contact spoke with Legal Advisors at the Ministry of Labor and
learned some very useful information about final pay and visas.
If you are working
in the UAE and suspect you may not get all
that is coming to you, you'll want to know your rights. It
seems there has been quite a bit
of abuse
by schools in the UAE and the MoL is taking it seriously. We also learned that you do not have to sign to cancel your visa. The visa is the school's responsibility and if they want to wait until the end to pay teachers and not leave them enough time to correctly sort out affairs, then it's not right that a school should expect help from teachers in sorting out their visas. If you do not sign, the school will not be able to replace your visa for a few years. You should be able to use this to negotiate full payment at a reasonable date. You would think that the practice of cheating teachers out of final pay checks, shipping and travel reimbursement occurs only in a one or two isolated incidences. The fact is, the practice is related in quite a number of reviews on the ISR web site. Thinking these things only happen to other
people allows these practices to persist. Take a tip from
the labor unions in the United States--organize and
stand
together
to ensure
your
school
acts
within the law. It appears there is accountability! More About Collecting Your Money in the UAE, Plus Phone the Numbers of Labor Ministers in Your Area Our previous article (above) brought inquiries from UAE teachers who wanted more information about the legality of their schools requiring them to surrender their visas before receiving final pay checks and travel and shipping allowances. The concern is that upon surrendering a visa in the UAE you must sign that all money due you from your employer has been paid in full. Imagine what a dishonest school might do!! More than one has done it already!!! We decided to contact the Ministry of Labor directly for clarification. To date, we have written twice through their "contact us " link and so far no reply. We also tried to post our questions to the Ministry of Labor's FAQ page, but it's not functioning. The MOL does offer a live chat option on their web site, but the page continually notifies us of the need to activate our cookies. Our cookies are activated and the live chat page still fails to function. We tried with two different computers and three different browsers. Our next step was to make phone contact. Our UAE contacts had called the MOL. After considerable searching of the government web site we found a list of phone numbers for the various Labor Ministers stationed around the country. The first number (below) wasn't functioning. So, we tried the next. It rang and rang and and no one answered even though the web site boasts services are available until 7pm. We were calling at 4pm UAE time and figured maybe everyone was in a meeting. We decided to call back the next day, and earlier. This we did and again found the Abu Dhabi number still out of order and the Dubai number endlessly ringing with no answer. We then dialed the next 5 numbers on the list and no one picked-up. Although we were yet unable to contact any one at the MOL by email or phone, we did find the following reassuring statement on the their web site. In all fairness, everyone could have
been out to lunch when we called. So we waited until
the next day and began calling again.
Based on our calculations it
was
3 pm
in
the UAE
when we
called. Still no answer.
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