Why is Interac so bad?

31 comments

1. Interac isn’t uniquely bad- it’s arguably the least bad of the bunch (but still bad)- dispatch companies are bad in general. A waste of taxpayer money, bad working conditions for ALTs, and getting steadily worse as time goes on.

2. I worked for Interac in 2017. I found the process to be straightforward and I got a great placement in a large, desirable, urban area. My school was chill and nobody ever gave me any trouble. I went to my monthly meetings (which were a huge waste of time but you’re paid to attend so whatever) and never had any issues.

   However, while in Japan, I developed a gnarly drinking problem. I mean, every night, falling asleep on benches and stuff like that. Buying shirts at the convenience store so people didn’t know I hadn’t gone home. I was deeply depressed and really going through it. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore, I went to the office and told them I’d need to leave because I was worried about my health and my mental health. They didn’t really seem to care. Like, at all. In fact, they asked if I could just tough it out and finish the school year, even though I had disclosed that I was experiencing thoughts of suicide.

   My point is, I was fine doing Interac until I needed them. And then I felt completely abandoned. They didn’t recommend mental health services or offer to talk or anything. All they were worried about was that my situation was going to create more work for them. Your healthcare in Japan is largely free your first year, but I had no idea how to navigate the resources since my written Japanese was intermediate at best (I studied in college and took lessons while there, but I was nowhere near good enough to read a medical website). I also admittedly didn’t try super hard because, again, drinking problem and depression.

   Long post to say Interac is fine, for the most part. If I hadn’t been going through a really bad breakup during my stay I probably would have had no issues with them at all. But be aware that for them you’re just a person filling a role. They need to keep those contracts and those schools happy. That will always be prioritized above any care that they have for you.

3. There is nothing particularly bad about it. But you need to have reasonable expectations, and a lot of people come with really rosy glasses.

   If you’ve never had a real full time job, never lived far from family, etc., it’s going to be harder. Pay isn’t what it should be, but many jobs globally are not paying what they should.

   Your experiences are going to vary greatly from location to location. The North branch is totally different than the Kanto branch, etc.

   Your experience will vary from school to school, from teacher to teacher, and from year to year. Some teachers hate ALTs, some love working with them. Some schools are putting a lot of resources into their ALTs, but others don’t. Pay is good relative to cost of living in some places, and not in others.

   Also, your first year is going to feel hard, but after that it’s easier.

4. I was an Interac ALT. The company was very ethical and my dealings with them were totally pleasant and professional. My issue was that the ALT job as it functioned at my schools was absolutely awful.

5. For the most part, Interac will leave you alone assuming you don’t screw up but

   1. The pay is awful (especially these days)

   2. There have been a few scandals the last few years with Interac (there was an infamous “don’t be sick” video that went viral and a few years Interac lost their Kanto contract and 100 people lost their jobs. Similar thing happened in Hokkaido too maybe 5 years ago)

6. I didn’t have a bad experience with them and worked there for 3 years. I broke my wrist in the third year and their support was very good indeed. However when I announced I was leaving that support evaporated even though I was still working for them. They even lied the local handler wasn’t available for my last appointment. As it turned out he was never asked, I bought my car insurance through him at the time and it came out that way when he asked how I was doing. He came to my final hospital checkup despite me saying he really didn’t have to and I didn’t want to take advantage and I paid him for his time in beer out of pocket….

   The company I moved to…Interac was better. I get zero support from the office here and they have frequently let me down. Thankfully my Japanese is pretty good these days.

   My experience is, so long as you turn up and don’t rock the boat, that’s all they want. once you leave, they don’t give a crap about you. All they want is someone fulfilling their contract and they don’t care a hoot that it’s you or someone else.

7. We got a girl from interac at our school, me being a JET. So she says they just uproot you whenever they see fit…she had to move to our prefecture because they said so. The pay is much less compared to JET. They are very strict on rules, they work same hours as us but any little thing they need to ask the dispatch company. For example, work hours are to 4:30 but the local bus comes at that time. Us JETs can leave earlier to catch that bus, but interac said no so she has to wait an hour more for the next one.

8. I worked with them for almost 5 years and had no big issues other than the pay. As others have said, they largely leave you alone. I felt like I worked more for my schools than I did for them. They offered me decent enough support if I ever needed help with anything, I met some really great people at the meetings and in my area through them and I generally really enjoyed my time teaching. I also had a ton of time off every year. However, I just couldn’t stay any longer with the salary. I had no money to do anything fun during that time off and my credit card bill was steadily rising. I think my branch was particularly good and I worked in high schools. I definitely recommend going for that if you continue with Interac. But yeah, the salary isn’t sustainable long term unless you are happy being ultra frugal.

   Edit: reading other comments reminded me of one issue I do have, they really don’t have your back medically. I severely burned my leg in 2018 in an accident involving boiling water. They gave me no sympathy on that one. I took longer getting to my schools because I had to visit the clinic every morning to get my burn re-dressed and then literally limp to school. They asked me what time I managed to get to school every day and deducted that much pay (we’re talking minutes of pay). That certainly rubbed me the wrong way.

9. I was with Interac from 2017-2020. Only 2 issues mainly with the person who was in charge or overseeing the ALT’s. The issues were mainly time off. Long story short… I was not scheduled to work and had plans to go some where and they tried to guilt me into working. 2nd time was putting in vacation request 4 months in advance and guilt tripped me and finally revealed that vacation given are not for vacation it’s for sick leave.

   They did some positives. The branch staff helped me with seeing a doctor when I threw out my back, when I got influenza for the first time, got me setup in my town and got me an interperter for my transfer of my drivers license.

   Other than that my 2 years there they left me alone.

   The pay isn’t great but I made the most of it. I didn’t save a penny LOL. I don’t have any debt I had to pay back home so everything I made I could use.

   Got a car from Interac which gets taken out of my paycheck. After all liabilties are paid I’m left with about 100k yen before food. Each month I buy food at Costco so was some what cheaper. Every weekend I drove some where and most of my weekends are either spending money for food and gas. I buy stuff on Yahoo Japan Auctions or Amazon Japan to resale. Made enough for money for fun and travel 🙂 As long as you have a side hustle you will be good on cash to do what you like.

10. Because they hire untrained, temporary workers who are just entering the job market for the first time to do a job that no one can tell whether they’re good at or not?

    Just imagine if Florida needed 1 million Mickey Mouses and outsourced it to a recruitment agency. Imagine how great that company would be.

    Nothing personal to the ALTs but let’s call this industry what it is.

11. I’ll say that it’s not that bad. I worked for them for a year before moving up.

    It will depend on where you are, number of schools, who else is in the area, and so many other factors.

    Ultimately though, it will depend on both your attitude and the schools’ attitude. My first school just wanted 15 minutes of games per day. I was bored to tears there, literally. Fortunately, another place nearby was having issues as they wanted almost complete lessons while their ALT was not into full teaching. (I’d already got my PGCE). Interac swapped us, and I was much happier, the school was great, and somehow I managed to wrangle a free kei car!

12. Interac are cunts. They called me on my wedding day that had been booked off months in advance to ask why I wasn’t at work. They deliberately sent me to distant schools as punishment for asking about legal working hours. And they fired me for attending my fathers funeral (I had to take legal action over that one. I won.)

13. I wouldn’t bother applying for any company other than jet tbh. Not worth your time. I wouldn’t come to Japan without working for them. They’re not perfect but the best you’ll find of all companies

14. 1. All dispatch companies in the EFL industry are to some degree parasitic. They take a chunk of the money your school pays for you to be there and there always comes a point where what they do to support you cannot equal the money they take from you. And the more value you bring to your employer (by knowing how to do your job, by not making trouble), the less they do to earn the money they take from you. If you do your job to a truly professional level, you are essentially passive income for the company.

    2. Interac can take a very patronizing attitude with its staff. A couple years back they scored an own goal where they put out this video meant to cut down on absenteeism and they basically framed everyone who misses a day of work as some selfish delinquent who pretends to be sick so they can stay home and play video games. Obviously some people no doubt do exactly that, but to present that as the main or only cause of missing work is deeply disrespectful.

    They are not the worst of the dispatch companies by far, but whereas others are cartoonishly exploitative or inept, Interac merely sets the baseline of exploitation and patronizing condescension in this industry.

15. I lived and worked in Japan for a long time… finally left during Covid… and Interac is actually better than some. They paid for transportation and they paid on time, which is better than some.

    These companies are so bad because they can get away with their shenanigans. The school boards are willing parties to all the bs they pull, as long as they can get imexpensive ALTs that they can get rid of dwithout any fuss. And if you quit? There’s no shortage of foreigners willing to work for them.

    The whole ALT system is corrupt and rotten, but nobody in a positionto fix it WANTS to fix it. Everyone is happy with it… except for the ALTs who get screwed over, but they are are all very replaceable.

    It has been a vew years since I worked for Interac, but the main problems I had with them (which are much the same problems with the other dispatch co panies…) were…

    The pay was not great, raises hard to come by, and little chance of advancement… and thepeople who did get promoted always regretted it afterwards.

    They refused to provide shakai hoken… pension and insurance.. even though all full time employees are required, by law, toget it. They avoided it by saying we worked just under the threshold that was considered full time. However, the schools believed we were full time employees, and expected us to work full time hours, and have all the responsibilities of fulltime dtatus, with none of the benefits.

    We had little to no control over where we were assigned.

    There were other issues, but these were the main oned.

    OP… if you just want to spend a few years experiencing life in Japan, working for someone like Interac isn’t too bad. Just don’t make the mistake of considering it a career. Stay a year or two… three at most… and then leave. Things will not get better.

16. With all dispatch companies, the school pays them a set monthly salary. 12 x (amount). The dispatch company then keeps 25-40% of that for themselves on the full months, and keeps even more/all on those months with less work time (like summer break). What you get paid is the remains after they keep theirs. Also, many school pay a bonus of 50% of 1 month pay twice a year to teachers. Guess who keeps all of that?

17. It all depends on what you want. Only you know that.

    If you want to be in Japan for a year it is perfectly fine.

    They will keep finding ways to reduce ‘costs’ and you are just another number. That is the reality.

    There is a lot of drama in these subs.

    My experience with them was fine. There were issues. Caught them lying etc. but I have a buddy that does music, so he does that for some side cash. No real drama.

18. here’s the thing bro. i’ve worked for about a half dozen of these companies, interac, altia, borderlink, cosmo, W5, –maybe one more, can’t remember—the real thing is this: it is what YOU make it. if you’re able to enjoy the WORK, kids, school environment, lunch, and then find something interesting to do when you get home, bro, they’re all the fucking same. no diff whatsoever. don’t scare yourself with the responses you get from jaded folks looking to pull you into their jade. none of these alt gigs are lifetime dream jobs bro. none. none of these companies give a f about you personally, none. it’s completely about the experience, and it can be a really cool one. make it your own. cheers man.

19. Interact makes profits by hiring untrained, unqualified people, giving them little to no training, and then asking them to do the job of a licensed educator for less than half the pay.

    This not only is a detriment to students’ education, it also devalues teaching to a large extent and drives down pay further each year.

    After all, why pay for someone with an MA when you can just get a random gaijin with a BA in “anything” to do it for minimum wage?

    So is it a terrible job for someone who only wants to play around in Japan for a year? Of course not.

    Is it detrimental to ESL education?
    Absolutely.

    ALTs don’t belong in a classroom doing the work that a licensed educated professional should be doing.

    Instead of using ALTs as cheap labor to relieve teachers of some of their crushing volume of work, MEXT should reduce that crushing volume of work and make teaching a valued profession with liveable pay.

20. They are known for forcing you to eat spaghetti.

21. Because they do not care a single iota about their teachers. One slip up, doesn’t even matter if the accusation is false or a misunderstanding, they’ll kick you to the curb without hearing your side of the story.

22. It’s only good as an in to Japan, for your first year, in my opinion.

23. I’ve worked for borderlink for 5 years and I think they’re an ok company. The pay is not that good but the job is super easy and not stressful at all and your work live balance is great. Before becoming an ALT i worked at eikaiwa’s and the pay was much better but the working hours sucked. I have no idea what the other ALT companies are like but I guess they’re all pretty similar.

24. My take is they are the best of a bad bunch. Year on year they ask more of you for no increase in wages.
    They don’t pay you for half of March and April(which sucks), they only let you choose ten days of your holiday entitlement, the other ten days they choose where they are allocated(at Christmas or summer).
    They reward the wrong type of alt, those who are unfriendly to other alts, but can speak Japanese. There’s no loyalty and when they are done with you they will discard you-it’s a road to nowhere.
    But they pay your pension and you do get holiday and they pay you for summer off-but they are starting to make it difficult to go anywhere with health checks and drug tests in the middle of when you might be abroad. But I prefer it to eikawa but the money does suck..

25. I mean, depending on your home country, coming to Japan in general does not end up well for a lot of people if you come to work (vacation is a different story though. I don’t think you can get much better than Japan for that).

    I’ll try to keep it brief, but you don’t just get hired as an ALT and people want to talk to you because they’re eager to learn English or whatever. You’re gonna be lonely most of the time, and you won’t get involved in many school events (unless you have an extremely great workplace).

    If you think you’re leaving home to come to paradise, don’t be mistaken. Chances are you’re going to have the same struggles, and unless you’re absolutely fluent, your struggles will actually be doubled cuz you’ll be trying to solve all your issues in a second language.

    Also, if you get placed in a big city (like Kyoto, where I’m currently located), you are going to be amazed at how rude these people are, if you are always inundated with those posts about how Japanese are so polite. Just like anywhere else, city people are rude, but the bad people here are more emboldened to be mean to others because the laws here are so strict to where if you just say anything that can be construed as “violence,” the police will arrest you, especially if you’re a foreigner. In other words, people have less means to stand up for themselves, so they have to be submissive and just let others treat them like trash.

    I don’t want to tell you not to come to Japan because it’s possible your experience could be different. If anything, I would say, bad or good, living abroad will make you grow in ways you couldn’t imagine, so I encourage it. I just feel the need to keep it real with people.

    There’s none of this “Japanese are this” or “Japanese are that.” They’re humans just like the rest of us, and they are no better or worse.

    Sorry that I can’t speak for interac though. I’m in JET, and my experience with them (excluding this other stuff I listed, which is not related to the agency itself) has been fantastic.

26. I worked as an ALT with Interac 18 years ago for 18 months. In that long a time it has probably changed a lot, but I was mostly left alone and heard about them just once a month for the pay.

    The worst I can think was that I was hired as a Spanish teacher but ended teaching English instead which I truly hated because it wasn’t my field of expertise. When I finished the contract I just stopped working as a teacher. That experience (mixed with a student suicide) ruined everything for me and I couldn’t teach anymore.

27. It’s simple.

    All dispatch companies offer absolutely NO value to anybody.
    The school? Nah, they charge the same as jet.
    The quality to the students? Lower than a JET ALT.
    To the teacher? Lower salary and worse living conditions.

    The reality is that the dispatch companies add ZERO value to anybody and siphon resources from all involved.

    The only singular thing they do, is offer you a visa if you cant apply to JET due to the strict application conditions (aka, having 1 – 2 years of your entire life to waste and being in your home country).
    Aka, with them, you can apply even if you already live in another foreign country.

28. I remember in their training they made a big notion that if a TV crew turns up to the school they must be called and will take action to get it shut down. That happened to me one day so called them up and said TV crew is here, but there response was basically “it’s up to you”.
    Also had to get the government involved when I wasn’t paid correctly.

29. So take this with a grain of salt as I was with Interac back in 2015-16 so things have changed. For one, it was actually one company and not split into the seven (though that change did happen a few months into my contract). They split because of a recent ruling by the Japanese government that stated companies of a certain size must provide health insurance for their employees. By splitting, each new “company” was small enough to avoid that. They also prorated my pay, so I took a significant pay cut for winter and summer breaks, about 25 and 50% respectively. However it’s my understanding that they do not prorate anymore though the pay overall has decreased to compensate.

    My personal gripes. I felt like I was being nickel and dimed for *everything*. If I submitted a transportation request they’d take their sweet time processing it or find some excuse for why it wasn’t valid. But the big one was they insisted I get a Japanese driver’s license. I was only planning on being there the one year and my permit would have been fine for that one year. But they would not leave me alone about applying for an actual driver’s license. So I decided to humor them and go through the process. I had to travel to my prefecture’s capital city to take the written and physical test which was two hours away. I went to take the written test on one of the days I was on call. They were just about to schedule me for the physical test when they told me I’d have only three vacation days left. And I was like, pardon? So even though they were the ones who insisted I get the license and set it up for me to take the test, it turned out that I would not be compensated for the photos or the materials I needed including what I had spent to get my driving records from my home state, but I had burned a vacation day by going to take the written test and they expected me to burn another for the physical (assuming I would have even passed the first time). I was pissed and found it super scummy that they were so pushy about getting it but expected me to cover all of it like it was something I’d chosen to do.

    Bottom line, Interac is a dispatch company and some sketchiness is part of the territory. From what I’d heard, Interac is one of the better ones but the bar is in hell. That being said, it’s a great way to get into Japan especially if your goal is to be there long term. But I’d move on after a year.

30. ALT/Headteacher 2017-2022

    Your enjoyment of interac will entirely depend on your school and your co workers. I have a FANTASTIC 4 years, with a free house and wonderful schools. I broke my ankle once and felt a little let down that interac expected me to go to work the next day instead of resting like the doctors suggested.

    A girl in the same BOE as me (same situation, same housing) had her credit card stolen and used by a child at work, interac did not stand up for her and instead just moved her to a different prefecture instead of facing a problem with the school.

    It’s luck of the draw and if you’re the kind of person to just roll with the punches and not create any form of conflict, you’ll be absolutely fine. If you’re the kind of person who likes to stand up for yourself and your rights and you encounter a situation you’re not happy with, then you may have a problem.

    I’m not saying you should be a doormat, but this really is just how the company works.

31. Still better than Borderlink