Here as elsewhere in this blog I make no suggestion that the information is from other sources than my own observations and opinions.
The recruiting agent claims a number of things to be true about its operations. These claims you can read on its Web site, accessible on a Google search with the words ‘Brunei teaching’. Whether the agency’s employees and managers believe these claims to be true or not, one fact stands in plain contradiction to them. The recruiting agent that operates in Brunei is under a head contract which obliges it to provide teacher recruitment services to the Ministry of Education in return for payment. Therefore everything that the Ministry wishes to impose on government-employed teachers in Brunei, the recruitment agency must allow. Please be clear on this before you are told the opposite by the recruiting agent. The agency has no binding influence on the conditions of work that apply to government-employed teachers in Brunei. It cannot set any of the conditions of work by definition of its contractually bound relationship to the Ministry. It never shall be otherwise as long as that contract exists. This is a fatally compromised position, except for the purposes of making money.
The agency is unable to effect institutional change in the education system or the Ministry. It is in the same compromised position as the court advisor to the King in feudal times, the latter possessing the right to have the former beheaded if his advice is unwelcome. I believe that as a consequence of this, the agency has turned most of its energies to the relationship that it can control: the subsidiary contractual agreement that it makes with individual foreign teachers. It becomes the second of the slave’s two masters. I do not have enough legal training or money to challenge the terms of the contract that I signed with the agency, and I doubt that it is legal, at least in Brunei, to publish details of the contract on the Internet. However, I urge anyone who has been offered a contract with this agency in Brunei to look carefully for any part of it that specifies (i) the physical and practical conditions in which the teacher will work, or (ii) the maximum number of hours they may work per week under the terms of the contract. The employment contract is devoid of those specifics because it is not in the power of the parties to determine them. That power belongs to the Bruneian Ministry of Education.
If they can pull the contract round you, the agency gains an advantage: the conditions, nature and quantity of work that actually obtain in Brunei’s government schools are converted to hearsay. The facts continue to exist, but to the newly contracted teacher they are facts only checkable from the physical, ground-level position of a job in Brunei. Hearsay makes up a large portion of the telephone interview that applicants will receive. Not having been contractually defined, working conditions will be described as the recruiting representative personally has heard of, or experienced them. Here, psychological bias will play a large part in how the information about working conditions is both divulged and interpreted. Confirmation bias on the part of the applicant is to be expected: having landed a new job, often in order to escape an unsatisfying job at home, the applicant will be reluctant to accept the evidence of his own ears when such red flags as ‘split weekend’ and ‘record book’ are raised by an earnest and cheerful recruitment representative. The interests of the representative in creating a positive impression of the job are obvious.
Recruitment of foreign English teachers in Brunei is arranged so that details of working conditions and responsibilities in written form will only be revealed during the two-week orientation program after the applicant has committed to international relocation. I estimate that had I actually packed my baggage and taken a flight home at my own expense during the orientation phase, I would have saved myself at least $7,000 in unnecessary purchases of motor vehicle loan deposit and repairs, furniture, freight charges and other household goods, apart from gaining the obvious benefit of avoiding months of exploitation in a bizarre social and working environment and its associated psychological distress.
There is a contradiction in the stated aims of the recruitment agent and its political position in Brunei. The agency’s Web site and its orientation course for newcomers emphasise the non-changeable nature of Brunei. They present Bruneian culture as ideologically and practically sacrosanct. However, if students’ English proficiency is to develop through highly-trained foreign teachers’ efforts as the agency also says it would like, then the way things are done in Brunei, beginning with the way English is taught and learnt at high school and primary school level in Brunei, must change. It is just not possible that at the same time as English proficiency in Brunei improves, nothing about Brunei’s education system changes.
The Brunei department of the recruitment agent, which is a global organisation, has become infected by the hopelessness of Brunei’s case as a nation. I suggest that people responding to this blog, if they are able to do so anonymously, include the name of the agency in their comments so that the name is captured in search engine references to this blog site. I take no responsibility for what people responding to this blog might wish to say about that agency, while welcoming their full and frank opinions.
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