Dear esteemed readers, please let me present a most heartfelt appeal to any god-damned fools out there who might be considering a stay in 'The Sandpit'. Take good note of the little story below and don't say that you were never warned!***
I worked at HCT full-time for more than 10 years, and can
honestly state that during that time it changed from being one of the best employers
in the UAE to one of the worst – if not THE WORST!
I went there in 2010 with high expectations, and enjoyed
(initially) having many excellent colleagues with diverse backgrounds and
nationalities. Without doubt, HCT used be a decent place to work between 2010
and 2014, and the management allowed, appreciated and even encouraged innovation.
Above all, there were many (OK, several)
highly talented students there in those early years, and it was usually a
pleasure to teach them.
But it was about halfway through my second contract when it
started to become clear that the orientation of the management had changed. Contracts
became entirely subjective, not even worth the ink they were printed with, as
senior management displayed a shameless lack of respect for the rules, changing
the conditions all the time without even informing us teachers. The prospects
of demotion and dismissal became ever greater, with the very real possibility
of losing your job at a moment’s notice. One of my colleagues was fired on the very
day he was due to take leave – only three days after having his contract
renewed! I also heard horror stories of faculty being given their dismissal
papers in the middle of lengthy and serious health treatment.
Whereas HCT had once been one of the best paying colleges in
the UAE, that quickly changed. Several staff members (non-teaching/faculty) received
NO salary raise for almost a decade, even though living in the UAE had become
ridiculously expensive. Moreover, faculty used to have the education fees for
their children paid in full, but that was suddenly cut by half in the middle of
the last school year I was there. Even worse, when the dreaded Faculty Merit
system was initially introduced, many holders of doctorates found themselves
downgraded to instructors in the middle of their contracts. At the same time,
our Health insurance was abruptly changed, thus depriving many staff of their
essential medication, even for long-standing illnesses such as diabetes.
Another example of HCT’s lack of moral fiber is the depressingly
high level of back-stabbing that went on there. In the latter days of my stay
at HCT I witnessed many acts of the worse kind at all levels: senior staff would
often spy on each other’s emails, and certain teachers would feel no shame in ‘snitching’
on their colleagues to curry favour with their supervisor. All this treachery
and betrayal only ever served to ensure that they continued to harm each other,
instead of working for the benefit of the organization.
Finally, anybody who is still considering working for HCT
should be aware that the contract you sign contains several articles that
clearly conflict with the UAE’s Federal Labor Law – in other words, your
contract is ILLEGAL! However, many of my HCT colleagues never discovered these
conflicting articles until they were arbitrarily sacked!
Still thinking of signing up? FORGET IT!!
