How to ask for a pay raise

Hi all,

I'm a "freelancer" English teacher working for a private Sprachschule. I have already taught for the company for 6 months, and my starting pay is 16 euros/teaching hour.
I've been reading up on a lot of forum posts regarding how much the employers rip employees off. I just found out today for example, that teaching a class of 6 students for 2 hours will earn my Sprachschule 420 euros, while I'm just getting 32 euros of the cut. And for company classes, you can bet that gap between what the Sprachschule and the teachers earn is much much bigger.

I know I can't get too angry about being exploited, because I have my limitations (ie, this is the only decent-paying job I can get in Germany). Also, I started new in this industry, so 16 euros is quite good. But I know for a fact that all the company students like me, and I'm doing a good job teaching and bringing in the dough for the company. My other limitations is maybe that I'm 23, but being young doesn't mean I don't "need" all that money.

Now I would love to get a fairer cut. Afterall, I have to do all the actual teaching work, not my employer. I've already approached my boss about giving me a raise (though I haven't specified how much), and she said she'll consider it in the next 1 or 2 months. But I'm impatient, I want a fairer pay now.

I'm really quite inexperienced in these matters, and I'm asking all the people who are more experienced to please help me:
1. what is the best way to go about asking for a raise? and when the reason is-- 'I want my cut' ?
2. what is a 'fair' hourly rate for someone like me at this stage and for this type of employer? 17 euros? 20 euros? 25 euros?

Any help would really be appreciated. I don't want any hostile feelings with my employer, just reasonable fairness. Thanks in advance.

My guess is that your choices are limited. Most language schools are a bit of a racket, in my opinion, and there is always a fresh supply of teachers willing to work for less. It's unfortunate. Good luck...

The best , and perhaps only foolproof, way to get a pay raise is to get another job.

If an employer knows you have nowhere else to go then why pay you more? If you're a good employee and they fear losing you they will pay you what they need to to retain you.

I was paid about 20 euro per "teaching hour" (45 minutes) within the city, 25 euro outside the city. I don't know about the cost of living in Kempten, but Munich is quite expensive. What kind of "cut" were you expecting?

And if you want your 'cut' you're going to struggle to get it. That's not the way it works. You can expect a going rate for the work you are doing. If you want to deal in cuts setup your own company.

Jealously...

Thats all..

Get real. Wake up and smell the coffee. They have loads of costs aside from your €32. They have rent, rates, taxes, regulations, heating, ADVERTISING, other indirect staff, legal costs, stationery, cleaning, repairs, equipment, depreciation, toilet rolls, insurance etc etc. Even your €32 will cost them more than €32 with the employer costs!!

If €16 an hour is the going rate then accept gracefully and don't push your luck. Natural market forces are always at work here. If the prices charged to the students is too high, and their profits too high, a competitor will step in and fill the void.

Sheesh. Just wait until you see the profits LIDL and ALDI make and you'll be arguing at the checkout over the price of milk.

Call the waaaaaaaaaahmbulance. I stand in a bar for 10 hours a night, clean it perfectly in case the Gesundheitsamt comes on a surprise inspection and sometimes don't go home with even €50.

Of the €420 they collect 20% is gone for VAT. They have to pay you your €32, plus another 40% of that for your taxes/social/medical, building, utilities, phone, materials, secretaries, lawyer, insurance, Web site & hosting, etc. That €32 may be a bit on the low end but they're hardly raking in the big bucks.

woof.

I don't even know if your language school is actually profitable, but in theory anyone that works on the checkout at ALDI is being royally screwed to the floor whilst Karl and Theo pocket all the filthy cash.

Along with anyone that works at a bank.

Or anyone that works at Porsche.

errrrrr...get the idea?

Before you guys start attacking, please understand where my views come from. There's no need to be angry or be mean about it, I'll like to have a mature discussion about this. (And there's no need to modify the Topic Title for fun, don't abuse your power as an editor tsk tsk)

As a freelancer teaching english, there is ALOT of expenses to pay by yourself. Your employer don't cover your health insurance (a must for expats), they don't pay for your pension, and they pay less taxes because they don't have "employees". As an expat, you don't get help from the government when you are out of a job either.

I am paying about 200 euros/month for my health insurance, and already that is 20% of my monthly income. And I will have to pay tax (around 19%) on top of my 1000 euros/month income.
Living in Germany is expensive, there's rent and utilities which come around to about 300 euros for me. And I need to eat, drive to work (30 euros/week)...I'm quite sure my lifestyle is very different from my employer's.

So here is what I've been reading in the forum. And these views aren't just expressed here in Toytown, they're also in other websites like: http://www.eslbase.com/advice/germany.asp and http://elt.yuku.com/topic/384/t/What-is-a-fair-rate.html



From: http://www.toytowngermany.com/forum/index...showtopic=75373

I understand where all your views come from. But if no one can understand these views, I consider this topic closed.

Hi,

My experience is more from the other side of the table (recruiter or people manager) but two general points on negotiation:

1. the first to name their price loses - so let the employer suggest a price, it may be more than you would have asked

2. if you can't walk away you can't negotiate.

Actually my opinions are with JE and Naughty Canine: no-one is ripping you off. Generally, if you want more money, don't be seen as a commodity. Somehow stand out.

Good luck,

TPWNN

If you come across as badly when you're negotiating as you do when you're posting on here you may be in for a nasty shock.

Todays Times has some suggestions

X2. That is how I got raises back in the States.

I'm sure it is. Having known owners of OMBs (including language teaching) I can vouch that they have to work very hard, for many long hours and with lots of stress and uncertainty - this sometimes includes their employees suddenly declaring that their agreed renumeration is no longer adequate

Oh, and I can also vouch that they don't end up with that much money either.

This is a VERY VERY important part of the equation that is NOT 100% clear to me. I have never owned or run a language school but am 99% sure that the tricky part of the business is getting 6 bums on seats at the same time, and paying the €420 discussed. Getting the muppet to stand at the front is easy 'cos every ex-pat on the planet can teach English as a fallback option (and plenty of Germans too).

So...

You said you are bringing in the dough for the company. Does this mean you are finding these punters that are signing up for the courses? In which case you ARE a valuable asset and can almost certainly negotiate a better or rate or more likely a bonus/commission based on the new students that you sign up. e.g. 10% for every class you book.

But if you are just the bloke at the front with a piece of chalk - how can you say you are bringing in the dough???

p.s. As you can read from The Times article moaning about your own lifestyle costs, german tax levels, or your expat health insurance are of no interest to your employer.


Don't he?

I agree that English teachers get ripped off. Compare it to IT freelancers - they get much, much more than €16 an hour and I know that the hourly rate paid by a company who's hiring an IT freelancer rarely even gets up to €200 an hour that's being paid by an English class. The agencies that deal with IT contractors would have the same sort of admin expenses, but they still make money out of it - so yeah, someone's making a killing in the English teaching business and it's not the teachers.

However, there is not a single IT contractor that I know, who would work for €16 an hour - and that's where your problem lies. If you aren't willing to get ripped off teaching English, then there's someone else who is - ´so why should they pay you more if other people are willing to work for a pittance?

If you ask for more money, you have some hope of getting a bit more, but no hope of getting fairly compensated.

So my advice is to either start your own English teaching company or get out and do something else.

Does the school provide you with resources which you don't have to pay for yourself, such as teaching materials, textbooks, dictionaries, paper, pens, Internet access at the school, Teeküche, comfortable classrooms? If the school offers few if any of those things, has poor teaching facilities and you're paying for a lot of the resources out of your own pocket, you might be better off going it alone.

I don't see why that's so tricky - looks to me like they just bung a few posters in the U-Bahn and make a nice looking website to attract the customers. The real work is building a good reputation as a good language school - to keep not just the current students coming back, but for new students to be found by word of mouth and I'd say 90% of that image comes from the teacher.

As another solution, can't you try to lure students, who may want extra help or want to go on to a more advanced course once they've finished the one from the school to bypass the language school and come straight to you? Or if a student is happy with you as a teacher, then get his mates to come directly to you? You could offer one-on-one lessons for the same amount (or even half the amount) as someone pays to be in a classroom and you'd both come out on top...

Sure you do.

Same as running a bar dude. You just open the doors and people walk in and drink the beer. Don't even need the posters on the U-Bahn. In fact running a business is soooooo simple I dunno why anyone works for anyone else anymore.

Mate - the point I'm making is that it's the teachers that are responsible for the good reputation. Sticking any muppet with a bit of chalk in front of a blackboard is not what's going to get students to come back for advanced courses or provide the positive feedback that's required for more students to come in. If I was to look for an English course and trying to decide which one to take, the first thing I'd do is check for reviews of some kind. And I'd be looking at the quality of the teachers first and paying little or no regard to how well the admin staff do their job.

The analogy with a bar is a good one - it's really not hard to get people to come in once. The hard thing is to get them to come back and bring their mates...

So whilst the school can claim all the credit for getting the bums on the seats in the first place, they can't claim much credit for keeping them there or even for the next lot of bums on seats.

So bar staff should be paid more?

What about ubahn drivers? In Berlin they move like 1 million people per day. They should get more money.

I am gonna open a language school that serves beer. It'll be a fucking goldmine. Especially as everyone know you speak better foreign languages when drunk.

Rather scarily, if I owned an ex-pat bar in Munich I suspect that an evening of amusing german language tuition, with beer, would be a winner - but then I don't know shit about bars 'n stuff - I leave that to the experts!!

They should be paid a fair proportion of what they're worth.

Sadly, in the bar business, the sales of a single bar tender doesn't average out to a €420 profit after deducting stock costs for every 2 hours that they work...

Also, bar staff generally aren't freelancers.

I have been on both sides of this issue, both the trainer in front earning a measly portion of the dough and the language school owner, getting "easy" money for someone else teaching. My answers to your questions:

1. what is the best way to go about asking for a raise? and when the reason is-- 'I want my cut' ?
You asked for a raise and your boss said she would consider it in a month or two. That seems pretty fair to me. The reason of wanting your cut isn't valid, for all the reasons you've already been given. Finding customers, paying rent, organising classes is a lot more work than you think it is. If you don't think it's much, try doing it for yourself. You'll earn more, but you'll need to work much harder. Oh, and speak pretty fluent German.

2. what is a 'fair' hourly rate for someone like me at this stage and for this type of employer? 17 euros? 20 euros? 25 euros?
You don't say what your training for teaching EFL is, and you admit that you are new and don't have a lot of experience. You might be lucky to be getting work at all for all I know. I think 16 Euros is pretty low, but I really don't know what the average is in your area. Best thing for you to do is to find some other EFL teachers and ask around what they get paid. And if they are other places paying more, contact them and ask for some work.

For what it's worth, a list of Honorarempfehlungen for various freelance teachers (based on the data they entered). The conclusion: Fees vary a lot.

Taking into account that teachers have to work more than the actual 45 min. class (preparing the class, afterwards correcting tests, homework), I also think that 16 € is not really well-paid. But in any pay raise talk, asking for more than a 5 to 10 percent raise is unrealistic.

Don't be soft. That is the most generalised bollox I have ever heard. I had 50% pay rises when working in the city when requested. That 5% and 10% cock is just what the establishment wants you to think. It's actually quite sad that they have managed to warp your brain into thinking that way.

I am talking about the poor sods that don't work in the city. Also I think it makes sense to increase the pay gradually and not by bounds, otherwise the pay scale would seem arbitrary. I mean, when you decide to pay 50 percent more, does that mean that the job the employee did until then was only half as valuable, and overnight the added value doubled? Or worse, by doing so the employer would admit that in retrospect he knowingly underpaid the employee.

Most schools offer some sort of pay-scale, the scam I worked for had some sort of testing and observation program that didn't work and wasn't implemented. So when I asked for a raise and was told that I have to go through the appropriate measures that were not yet in place, I politely said okay, found a new job and essentially screwed them over by quitting without notice (read your contract, you can do this in some places). That left them to cover 14 classes a week, and I knew they had a shortage in teachers bc pretty much everyone else left. This was all the satisfaction I needed: knowing that they were losing customers bc they had lost their most well rated teacher.

The best advice to for you to find another job. And fast.

Yep, 5% is bogus. I got tired of fighting for a measly 5%... quit, and doubled my salary in a new job. Yes, DOUBLED. Same University, different boss. The American boss decided I was more valuable than the British bastard boss thought.

Mine was just an example. This 5% and 10% cock might be relevant if you are a bus driver, but in many other areas such as sales, banking etc it is no guide at all.

Life and the economy is never that simple. So might be that you started a job, and are now making the company 5 times as much income as when you started, and then a company offers to poach you. Just market forces at work. Original company can then make a commercial decision to keep you, or let you go.

For example we know that in our example the scale is very variable - between €10 and €50 an hour. If he picks up a job offer at €25 an hour and tells his current company - they can choose to match or say goodbye. Commercially it might be that they choose to pay the €25 an hour - which is a rise of over 50% as it happens.

Mlovett, this doesn't contradict what I wrote. I also think that looking for another job with better conditions from the start can be a better way of actually getting an appropriate pay.

That is what you wrote!! And that is what I am saying is a pile of horseshit. Simple enough?

JE, I think we are crossposting (I'm a bit too slow), otherwise I can't see why you are so upset. BTW, I got this "pile of horseshit" piece of advice from a German executive in a multinational company (with regard to pay raise talks for non-executive employees). So that is the way employers think here. What's wrong with taking that into account and not start pay raise negotiations with unrealistic expectations?

Ah my deepest apologies. If you got this advice from a German executive in a multinational company, then of course it is correct and I am just a humble fuckwit.

To all readers of this thread please note. A german quoting a german has decreed that all pay discussions will be between 5% and 10%. We will have order in the workplace.

p.s. Can someone please shut that drafty window 'cos I am getting an unknown blood disease and please call me Herr. English from now on.

I understand your views and have no interest in attacking anyone. I do some El teaching but no means full time or reliant on it.

Isn't the problem more that you are in a part time job? 1000 Euros a month at 16 Eur per hour is only a couple of days a week. I know plenty of EL teachers who earn 2-3 times that even at low rates. Most people that do a couple of days a week in a relatively low paid job are going to struggle particularly in a high cost, high tax nation.

Why not press your contractor / client for more classes? Or find a school that can give your more? Put some ads in the paper (and charge more?).

No way is the company geting c. 440 Eur for one 2 hour session. It'll be per month, 4 weeks etc.

Otherwise, that maths stacks up to me as a standard business model. Of that 440 Eurs, you get about c. 150 (some multiple of *32 for the 4 weeks) or about 1/3.

1/3 to worker, 1/3 running costs, 1/3 investment / profit is a business standard. It's the same share that a consultant on 50k p.a. working for an employer will get. They bill 150k to earn that and their partners keep most of that.

Not standard for a freelancer, however. From my experience, a freelancer takes between 70-80% - at least that's the case for an IT freelancer and I see no reason why that shouldn't be the same for a teacher. OK, if the person is on-site at the school and they need to supply a classroom and materials, then take away another 10%, but that should be it.

Expecting to be paid 70-80% of what the school charges is very unrealistic. The school has to pay for admin staff, teacher training, rent, bookkeeping, advertising, marketing, sales, developing new courses, tax consultant, lawyer, covering bad debt, insurances, teaching material, office supplies, office furniture, cleaning staff, recruitment, coffee and tea, photocopier, computers, heating, telephone, etc. Then the school has to pay tax on its profit. At the end of the day there should be some money to go into the owner's pocket to make it all worth while. It's called capitalism. Before you cop off about being exploited check how much you pay for your coffee or clothes.


Hmmm...420/6 = Each students pays 70€ for 2 hours teaching. (2Ustd=2x 45mintues). That seems a trifle expensive. Are you sure about that?

Well the consulting company that I'm working through has most of those overheads as well. Sure they don't do any training or provide their contractors with any office supplies, but they also have staff and all the rest of that stuff and they pay their taxes too. They work at getting new consultants and clients and have fully equipped offices. They even appear to have cleaners and coffee too. Yet somehow they manage to pay me 80% of what they charge the customer. Not only that, but I've worked through other agencies too and I've gotten a similar percentage from everyone. And guess what? The bosses all still wear nice suits and drive flash cars...

Of course it's capitalism - they're ripping their teachers off because they are willing to do that job for a pittance. I'd probably do the same in their position...

I find that surprising. I know from personal experience it's not possible with a language school. In fact, I know people who've tried to pay their teachers "a fair" wage and they've gone bust.




I would agree with you that the school could pay more if they were really charging 420€ per 90 minutes. I suspect they aren't charging anything like that figure. If I were in a six person group and paying 70€ for a double lesson, I'd expect my teachers to be naked except for black suspender belts. (that goes for male teachers too). In fact for 100€ per session, I'd probably learn more if I had some one-on-one time with an experienced prostitute. I would hope the prostitute would get at least 70-80% cut.