NO BREAK although specified in contract. You are asked to eat your lunch while watching and feeding the children during lunch. You are forced to come 30mins before your shift every day to greet the children and their parents, unremunerated of course. There is also 1h of unpaid overtime "meeting" once a week, during which you are asked to clean the classrooms, hallways, toilets and so forth(the scheme here is that they tell you that these unpaid overtime hours for the so-called “meetings” will be compensated as 6 days off at the end of the year, which is ILLEGAL as overtime work should be remunerated as such). All in all, coupled with the lack of shift breaks, you are on average doing 8.5H OF UNPAID OVERTIME EVERY WEEK. Additionally, they force you to attend unremunerated events such as sports day, graduation day, and event rehearsals outside of your shifts, mostly on weekends. When I told HR that I wouldn’t work unpaid overtime anymore, they threatened to deduct the overtime hours from my salary, which is obviously ILLEGAL and I had to report it to the local Labour Standards Bureau. Time card entries are strictly made by the school managers and, as you guessed, they are told to NOT LOG IN OVERTIME HOURS. According to my contract, I am allowed 10 days of annual paid leave ONLY AFTER 6 months of service, but I was coerced into taking all of them on company holidays, just weeks after I started. They came up with these FRAUDULENT 10 days of “recommended paid vacation” on which you are FORCED to take 10 of your annual paid leave. Those 10 days of “recommended paid vacation” are all days when the company and schools are closed anyway, which makes this whole practice ILLEGAL. If you refuse to take them on the “recommended” dates, they threaten to deduct those days out of your salary, which according to the Japanese Labour Law, is also ILLEGAL. Employees are constantly getting harassed by ABUSIVE HIGHER-UPS, especially the Japanese and Filipino staff members, sometimes in front of the children. Some have, on multiple occasions, burst into tears because of their abusive remarks. The children are terrified of them and most, if not all staff members despise them. When confronted with complaints about the terrible working conditions, they always try to GASLIGHT you. Telling you that, according to their lawyer, there is nothing wrong nor illegal about how they run things and if you are not happy about it you should talk directly to the lawyer. HR is also useless as they are the ones behind those EXPLOITATIVE schemes. According to Japanese law, daycare institutions should have 1 qualified nursery teacher for every 6 toddlers aged 3 or under. However, most Ceci schools are UNDERSTAFFED and are operating without any qualified nursery teachers at all, which is, you guessed it again, ILLEGAL. You have on average 2 foreign teachers and 2 Japanese assistants to manage 30 to 40 children daily. And this number can go up to 50+ kids during their greedy seasonal campaigns(Spring, Summer and Winter schools). Most teachers are already BURNT-OUT by midweek due to being OVERWORKED. Not to mention that there are always staff members quitting. Some even quit before the end of their probation periods. The curriculum used at Ceci is INCOHERENT and ILLOGICAL. It’s supposedly based on EIKEN programs, reinterpreted by the non-native English speaking headteacher and it is absolute NONSENSE. Some teachers try to teach their own stuff on the side but you can do so much when you are overworked.
