Your Services Will No Longer Be Required

Apparently, about 40 to 50 teachers at one of the international schools in Suzhou will not be returning to teach in the Fall. “They asked the teachers what their plans were for next [academic] year,” a British friend said round a table of beers fogged in with cigarette smoke. “If they were even a little unsure,” he made a chopping action in the air, “they got their notice.”

Of course, that led us all at the table of ten hardy fellows to wonder if Suzhou would ever have the number of expats it did at its peak in the Spring of 2007. The Brit said, “I asked what nationalities were pulling out of the schools. The teacher told me, in this order: the Koreans, the Taiwanese, the Hong Kongese, the Mainlanders.”

I offered that it would be several years before Suzhou would have such a glut of Westerners - and easy money. And, of course, with new Western restaurants (owned by Chinese) still going up, it’s a wonder if there’ll be sufficient business to go round to them all.

“Chinese people don’t like Western food, for the most part,” an American chipped in.

But the city will sure miss the income and business taxes their currencies brought in.

Laying-off is Easy To Do

A German friend told me over dinner (his, not mine; I had already eaten and was drinking a beer) recently that he had not been looking forward to laying off 25% of his staff. “We thought it would be a lot of paperwork and hassle and the local government [in Suzhou Industrial Park] would push back.

“I sent my HR manager over to the HR Administration building in the Park to find out what to do. They told her, ‘fill out this paper, that paper; what’s your reason for laying them off; ok, fine.” The German wiped his big hands in the air, like he would brush bread crumbs from his fingers. “It was so easy,” he said, and took a draught from his beer mug.

“The hard part was when some of them started haggling about the package,” he said. He looked weary from the memory. “And I thought about those kind of guys, ‘you, I should have fired you a long time ago.’”

Ignorance is Dangerous

A Danish manager of software development company in Shanghai told me over a terrible cup of instant coffee one morning in her office how concerned she is about how exposed her company is to IP (intellectual property) infringement lawsuits. The company uses subcontractors in China to produce graphics for the applications the company sells in the international market.

“We found out one of the subcontractors was simply going onto the internet and copying images to put in our software, without permission from the original designers and artists. When we told them that was illegal and we could all be sued, they said they didn’t know.”

One instance in which ignorance clearly was not bliss.

Salary Rises and Falls

A young Chinese told me how she remembered that her first job ten years ago had a starting salary of 300RMB. “I was so happy then! It seemed like such an unbelievable amount.” That was for office work in Suzhou, back then. The young lady then opened her own business about three years later, an graphics design company for advertisements for Chinese companies in Nanjing.

“I was making as much as 3,000RMB a month in salary; so much money back then [in 2003].”

“My sister was making 3,500RMB up until the end of last year, as an interpreter for an American company. That’s good money for that kind of position. But she was stupid and sent a letter to her boss that said she worked so hard and did so many things and that she should make more money. The company fired her instead; said that business was bad.

“Now, she just found a job with a German company in Suzhou doing some training. After sending out hundreds of CVs and a lot of interviews, she could only find this job.”

Starting salary: 1,500RMB.

Ah, for the good ole days.

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