My husband is an EMS teacher who will not continue in the new semester.
Teachers should stay away from this agency. When it started to function for the first time as an agency last year they hired a guy from New York who had retired from the UN and is also a board member of Literacy Tech Foundation in Washington DC. He designed EMS's presentation package along the lines of a spiraling education curriculum for English as a second language students. He was also trying to make EMS a place where teachers could be proud to work for. He instituted by-monthly workshops and other systems that would make it easy for teachers to function on the classroom floor. However, he soon found out that the owner cared less about standards, ethics, morality and quality and more about money, so this NY coordinator resigned.
The owner of the EMS has a reputation of fighting with the administrations of the schools for money, as a result of her bad PR; EMS’s teachers became despised by the school's administration.
Last year she demanded and got 500 baht from each teacher under the guise that all foreign teachers must join the Teachers Association of Thailand and they will receive a teaching license. EMS took the money, issued a receipt but nothing else happened. Further to that, and unknown to the foreign teachers, EMS added a clause in the contract between schools and EMS, stating that the school(s) can't directly hire any of EMS's teachers for a period of 2 years after the contract expires. This means if the foreign teacher did or is doing a good job, and the school would like to directly hire that teacher after his or her contract expires, the school is prevented from doing so.
EMS pays their teachers after it collects the check from the school and after the check is cleared in the bank, therefore the teachers usually get pay five or ten days into the new month for the previous month. EMS contracts with their teachers states that will be paid for a small amount of sick days provided they produce a doctor's certificate. However, EMS deducts between 1,200 and 1,500 Baht for each sick day (certified or not) from teacher’s salary claiming that EMS had to pay for substitute teachers to cover.
EMS only has a business license and is not a certified language teaching institution by the ministry of Education and can't by itself obtain work permits for teachers. EMS has to rely on the school(s) to apply for the work permits for its teachers. This usually leaves teachers in suspense or without work permit for three months.
Topic: EMS Agency Don Muang (Read 1913 times)