Part of my contracy negotiation for my contract was the settlement of my bonus. My manager tried to tell me that since I was resigning my contract, my bonus was deffered to the end of my next contract. I pointed out that signing a new contract doesn’t cancel out honoring their prior obligations, so I would be getting a bonus at the end of each contract.
The original contract specified I would get a bonus payment roughly equal to the cost of airfare to Korea. Since I was in the country, this was basically just a nice gesture, as I didn’t spend anything to get here. I got to pocket all the money. The bonus would be paid in two parts, one at the beginning, and one at the end of the contract. This second payment was what I was fighting to receive.
The first part of the "bonus" never physically changed hands, as the amount I was receiving was exactly equal to the amount I needed to pay as a security payment for my apartment to the school. Rather than get paid an amount, then immediately hand it right back to them as a security deposit, the previous manager called it even, and didn’t pay me anything up front. If I left at the end of the contract with the house in one piece with all the bills paid, I’d get the entire bonus amount, since he wouldn’t need to keep my security deposit.
This made sense to me, but when I got to the end of the contract and resigned, I didn’t get that second payment I expected. They kept my security deposit, as they should have since I was staying at their place, but I didn’t get the money that made up the second half of my "airplane bonus" that I was owed. When i talked to the new manager about this, he promised to call the old manager and sort it out.
I started pressing him about this today with the help of my wife. We were even willing to get in contact with the old manager ourselves to see what he would say. The current manager got around to calling the man he needed to contact, and I got to speak to him on the phone to sort everything out. The man agreed with everything I had said, but suggested that since there was no receipt proving I had paid my security deposit, or had gotten my first "bonus", they had a problem. Nothing got done in the school without a papertrail that showed where all the money had went, so the "calling it even" we did as we signed the contract had caused a bit of a disrupture in the accounting state of affairs.
The compromise he said, was to get paid the entire amount, both bonuses at the same time to honor the contract, then immediately hand one bonus back and say, "This is my security deposit". That way everyone would have a paper, or some sort of proof that business was done instead of a gentleman’s agreement. This idea was good enough for my mananger, who finally agreed to pay my bonus after weeks of stalling on the issue. So, now, as soon as their is payment into my account to honor my bonus, I’ll send half of it back as a security deposit. Then, when I leave the school, they’ll send the rest back to me when they see I paid all my bills.
I hate bueraucracy.
