Teaching with strep throat and working in fear: Kaplan course’s ugly underside

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/05/teaching_with_strep_throat_and_working_in_fear_kaplan_courses_ugly_underside/

Wednesday, Mar 5, 2014 07:30 AM CST

"We were just ... terrified of coming to work," Kaplan ESL teacher says. "People had nightmares"

Josh Eidelson



Paul Hlava


Twenty-one months ago, ESL teachers at three schools run by Kaplan – the for-profit education division of what was then called the Washington Post Co. – scored a rare union victory, winning a government-supervised election to become Kaplan’s first unionized employees. Last month, Kaplan teachers gathered with a brass band outside one of three now-unionized New York schools, protesting the fact that they still don’t have a union contract.

“Their strategy is just to make the work environment really terrible,” Kaplan teacher and Newspaper Guild union activist Paul Hlava charged in an interview late last week. “So that all of us who were around when the union started leave.” Hlava alleged he and his co-workers had faced illegal wage theft and aggressive union-busting in the months before they formed a union (“really, really terrifying”), and punitive policy changes ever since. “Even after Kaplan teachers voted overwhelmingly to join our union,” Newspaper Guild of New York union president Bill O’Meara charged in an email, ”Kaplan management is still refusing to negotiate a reasonable contract for their teachers.”

Asked about the allegations, Kaplan said in an emailed statement that “Negotiating a first labor contract takes time,” and that it “has modified its proposals in response to the union’s concerns and will continue to negotiate in good faith to reach a reasonable and responsible contract with the union through the collective bargaining process.” The company added, “Any agreement reached with the union must enable Kaplan to continue to meet the needs of its students and succeed in the highly competitive ESL business.”

A condensed version of Salon’s interview with Hlava follows.

Why did you form a union at Kaplan?

We had kind of seen the slow degradation of whatever little we had …

Some of the people who I was working with, they got hired at $24 [per teaching hour] … When I was starting, the hiring rate was $20 an hour — and then now it’s gone down to as low as $17 …

After working very hard for the company, and doing what we considered a lot of favors for the company — like doing extra hours, substituting classes or taking twice as many students as we were supposed to … they just then, like, randomly fire people …

One of the things that Kaplan had done was basically illegally not paid us …

FULL story at link.