Workplace reviews and discussion: 地球村出版有限公司

Short hours and lots of leave. If the people you work with are good, it’s paradise.

They deduct from employees’ base salaries. You work yourself to the bone making money for them, and then if someone requests a refund, they take back your bonus if you received one that month. It doesn’t matter how long ago it was—they will still deduct it. For example, suppose they set a target of 500,000 and a bonus of 10,000. But if someone requests a refund during a month in which you received a bonus, and after the deduction you no longer reach 500,000, that means they only lent you the money temporarily, because you still have to repay the entire amount. Recently, they have been handling this proportionally, but if you resign, you still have to repay the full amount.

They often tell you to work overtime when business is poor. If you don’t come in, you know the consequences yourself: you’re done for. There was even a time when they insisted that female employees come in to work overtime on a national holiday, but prohibited them from clocking in or wearing uniforms because they were afraid of being investigated, since they would not pay them. During the Lunar New Year, employees had to work hard for their own year-end bonus. The position is titled administrative front-desk secretary, but there is no year-end bonus. If you don’t meet the target they set, you get nothing.

Also, if the Lunar New Year falls around a payday and the date is after the 15th, they pay salaries after the holiday. So if you want to receive your salary before the New Year, it’s very difficult—it will usually come afterward. No employer pays before the holiday; they just make sure employees have money to go home for the New Year. In short, it’s a terrible company. Whenever they want to exploit you, they talk about labor laws. When you are being exploited, they don’t care about labor laws. Some people have had their salary deducted until only a few thousand or a few hundred dollars remained for the month. Do you think that complies with labor laws?

If you resign, they may tell you to leave immediately, and you have to. If they are short-staffed, they bring up labor laws to pressure you. But the company’s policies keep changing, and employees never know which version is actually correct.

Tuition prices keep changing, often causing employees to be berated by students. The teaching materials are extremely outdated and are never updated. If someone reports this, they tell the employee to ask the student for a refund. Then the employee may have money deducted again, right? The company doesn’t care about you, because this allows it to reduce its own losses.

When you resign, they absolutely will not pay you a full month’s salary; they calculate it based on the actual number of days you worked. So if you think you’ll be paid for the regular days off you were entitled to, think again. If you have unused annual leave, they will not pay you for it either. So if you plan to resign, calculate everything carefully, or you’ll be exploited like many others who resigned.

In summary, the system is terrible. They only drive long-serving employees away, doing everything they can to abuse them psychologically and force them to leave, because they never fire anyone—they don’t want to pay severance.