Embassy CES Uses Deceptive Tactics to Mislead Job Candidates

A craigslist job posting from earlier this month for an ESL Teacher at San Francisco's Embassy CES showed that they use deceptive tactics to lure prospective teachers.

In the posting they write, “Benefits include paid holidays and sick days (certain conditions apply) and paid preparation time.”

Here are some problems with that -

1. While it is true that companies are not obligated to provide paid holidays, the vast majority of larger companies do provide them. BTW, ECES (Study Group) is an extremely large company.
2. In California, employers are obligated to provide paid sick time (Thank you Governor Jerry Brown for signing AB 304 into law which took effect July 13, 2015).  Therefore, this is not a benefit, but just the company following the law.
3. Likewise for paid preparation time.  By law, all non-exempt employees (= paid by the hour) must be compensated for all time they spend working for the company.  This includes prep time.  So again, this IS NOT a benefit. See U.S. Dept. of Labor, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

Addressing #3 above - one might assume that Embassy CES learned its lesson from other corporate ESL schools in San Francisco like Kaplan and EF International both of which were sued by teachers who hadn’t been paid for their prep time. As part of the settlements in these cases, the companies were required to provide back-pay for all the prep time that they should have been paying to begin with.

These kinds of class action suits by teachers can force these greedy companies who disregard labor laws in their efforts to increase profits to be more honest.  I say only “more honest” because there is still a lot of work to be done.

P.S. If you are part of the Google Group - SF ESL Teachers, you can view the full job description/craigslist posting posted today at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/SFESLteachers