Arab News received a complaint from the Saudi teachers, who teach English, that they have not yet received their salaries and are still waiting for contracts they were promised the day they started their jobs.
“As soon as we applied for the job, the vice dean told us that it is a promising post. She also said the contract would be sent from Riyadh. Four months later, we haven’t received our salaries and our promised contracts,” one of the teachers said on condition of anonymity.
The teachers are expected to give daily lectures in a classroom that lacks air-conditioning and supplies like blackboards and projectors.
“When we fail to do a certain job, we get yelled at by the principal. And we are expected to do the job pro bono,” said the teacher.
The job requires teachers to offer so-called office hours dedicated to students who may need help with their work.
“As soon as we finish each class, we are expected to go back to our desks for office hours and get some paperwork done. But there are no desks and no offices. We are all sitting in a tiny room with a few desks here and there,” said the teacher.
Earlier this year, the vice dean had a meeting with the teachers and revealed that the college was firing some of the Saudi teachers who teach English to hire native speakers instead.
“We then suggested that she keep the Saudi teachers and let the native speakers teach students who only have a basic level of English and we’ll teach the advanced ones,” said the teacher.
“Her reply was that the college didn’t want to invest in the failures at the first level because it was paying a lot of money to those native speakers. We were shocked. They want to pay native speakers a lot of money and they cannot manage to give us our salaries,” she added.
Most of the affected teachers left the college, applied at others and were accepted. Some are still working there, waiting to see if they get what they were promised.
“I couldn’t handle the stress and the broken promises. I transferred to a better college where I’m treated better. I’m still waiting for my salary, which I hope they will give after all,” said one of the teachers who left the college.
