The Facebook page ‘Charlene Zammit Moore Respect Educators’ has posted the following post of another educator that it came across.
“My job is abusive. Over the past few years my clients have become more and more difficult. I am very dedicated to their needs but they don’t hold their end of the deal. They expect me to be patient and kind all the time but some of them are really rude, entitled and verbally abusive to me and my colleagues. We tell management about it but they don’t always do much or there’s too much red tape.
Apart from that, my job involved a lot of different skills – decision making under pressure, content creation, resource management, subject-specific skills etc…it also requires a lot of emotional intelligence and self-regulation. I’ve been in this sector for 8 years and I make 1,700 a month (after tax). It’s a struggle to keep up and considering so much is expected of me I feel I should be earning more.
What’s more is that we’re expected and pressured to take work home and continue working from home. I’m supposed to have some slots at work where I don’t deal with clients so that I can work on the administrative side of things – yet somehow these always end up being filled up with meetings or clerical things that I need to get done, or are just 40 minute slots! If I don’t take work home I fall behind in my personal life/chores/neglect my family etc.
This might sound stupid but another thing is that the work environment is really lacking of respect to us as humans. We don’t even have coffee available, sometimes run out of water and have to go and ask admin for more water, the toilets don’t even have toilet paper, we can’t use the bathroom whenever we want and office supplies are kept locked up.
One good thing is that we get a good amount of shutdown, but the truth is I’m so burnt out and wound up that I spend half my shutdown unable to relax, and then the other half is spent doing some work tasks so I won’t fall behind. Also, because we have shutdown we don’t get much leave during actual work periods.
Plus, apart from being a very fast-paced work environment, the CEOs/board members are super obsessed with numbers and output and want the company to look really good in the media, so they constantly change the way we have to operate in order to boost performance. It’s exhausting because we can’t keep up with all the new changes and systems. In the past 8 years they’ve introduced something new almost every year!
Finally, we’re very short-staffed (because clearly this job isn’t appealing to most people) and so there isn’t much chance of upwards progression. No promotions are available and we’re all working at maximum capacity with no one to relieve us. If we are sick we fall behind and our clients complain if we take ‘too much’ sick (according to them).
I love this job because when things are good, I get a lot of satisfaction, but lately it’s been too much.
I don’t know…should I ‘run’? Should I leave?
Thank you for reading this far. I wonder what you’re thinking, and if it will change when I tell you that I’m a secondary school teacher. Will that change your opinion? It seems we’re expected to tolerate abusive systems ‘for the children’. We are hurting and we need everyone’s support. When the education system falls apart, so does society.
Please, support us in your words and actions. Teach your kids to respect us and work with us, not against us – otherwise there will be no one left to teach the next generation.”