NOVANEWS
The American ESL Center, A Professional Nightmare, Video)
The story entails a language center in Amman, Jordan which has since 2006 continuously defrauded foreign teachers and students, severely abused its employees, sold copyright infringement, refused to pay its employees and fulfill promises, assaulted its employees, possibly spied and distributed personal information of its employees, and committed immigration fraud. This article attached to this e-mail is a product of Jordanians and Americans working together to stress the importance of labor reform needed in the country of Jordan. We hope with the recent article published in the Atlantic about the King of Jordan emphasizing his desire for reforming Jordan, this will be a positive message.
Below is one of the undercover videos we at Collective Consciousness have taken of the owner of this language center. Its contents reveal the owner, Khaled Allouzi, speaking horribly about other employees and also engaged in conversation about paying instructors to bring in students to cheat on the TOEFL exam (immigration fraud).
We have also attached photos of the location to this e-mail. There are photos of the back of the center, the front of the building where the center is located next to Majdi Mall, and the inside of the center.
Our evidence comprises of over 12 affidavits by former students and employees, public blog posts, and undercover video evidence. Education Testing services, the US Embassy, and the National Center of Human Rights are privy to this investigation.
The American ESL Center in Amman, Jordan:
A Professional Nightmare
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The American English as a Second Language Center (AESLC) is filled with bustling students eager to improve the speaking and listening comprehension skills not available at the traditional four year universities. Wonderful personalities, avid enthusiasts of the English language, and ambitious young adults seek an avenue to explore new opportunities they may ascertain with the English language. On the surface of this apotheosis, the appearance is one of a great business location which buttresses the potential talents of language students. Albeit the cliché involving appearances and deception is a tiring one to read or hear, its veracity has not exhausted as much significance as its waning popularity.
The AESLC has a stature equivalent to most infamous establishments, and it is a poignant example of why labor laws are often beneficial not solely to employees, but to customers and a country. The AESL Center is owned by a husband and wife who claim both American and Jordanian citizenship. Since 2006, the center has promulgated public complaints in blogs and discussion posts on social websites, private and public verbal condemnation, and also formal grievances against the center. The chatter on this place is proliferating and can no longer be ignored. What are the conundrums? The following is a result of a year-long discreet investigation by human rights organization, Collective Consciousness.
Abuse
The abuse of employees and customers encompasses more psychological than physical offenses, yet the damage is just as insidious. The criticism by former employees in a plethora of sworn testimonies range from personal insults of a humiliating manner by the husband-wife martinet owners of this establishment, to being contemned at for false accusations, and to mendacious threats. The only positive aspect of the owners’ severe abuse is they are at least not ribald when humiliating their employees. Several secretaries have been witnessed by teachers and customers, crying and shaking after being hollered at for such trivial mistakes as asking the female owner if she desired coffee, requesting salaries after the center was several months delinquent in releasing the funds to employees, or making a minor error such as forgetting to inform a customer of a TESOL class or a special discount by the center. One former employee stated,
“There are two other examples of unacceptable managerial behavior I witnessed, as did other teachers and students, openly in the center. The first one was a specific incident in which #### [female center owner] yelled and reprimanded a secretary in public while class was in session, sending her to tears. I can’t claim knowledge of the conflict, but feel compelled to mention the sight of the secretary crying. There was a student beside me who asked what had happened. I won’t forget that moment.”
A former coffee boy was sadly seen by two former employees being aggressively slapped, spit on, and chased out of the center by the male owner of the business on more than one occasion.
Teachers have also been menaced and threatened in front of students including one incident where the female owner chased a fleeing teacher out of her office after he repeatedly begged her “please #### , just leave me alone.” This employee was being admonished and mocked in front of the owners’ children and the Lead Instructor, within the confines of her dirty small office for over a time length of an hour. During the course of this interrogation, this employee had answered his phone and acted as if he had hung up his cell phone, when in fact, he kept the phone line open. A colleague on the other line heard the female owner screaming while the victim continuously brooked and requested in a polite and calm manner that he be treated as a human being. When he decided to leave, the female owner yelled, “You’re not going anywhere” and proceeded to hunt him down like prey from her office into the cafeteria area to commence scolding him in front of many students. Another former employee stated, “I have witnessed many experiences where teachers were yelled at, called stupid in many ways, where teachers were threatened by management to not get paid.” Other encounters by past employees enumerate persistent paranoid accusations by the owners against teachers for stealing textbooks, teaching outside of the center, he-said/she-said logomachy, and more.
Other expostulations by several former employees involve the two owners playing a childish game of divide-and-conquer where teachers would be secretly called into the office of either owner and ingratiate the employee with a warning that another instructor is spreading horrible gossip about him or her, that a co-worker is trying to steal or cadge their students or purloin their opportunities for promotion, and more. This type of strategy does well in creating an unhealthy environment where the staff are more concerned about their colleagues’ perfidy and fighting each other rather than on querying why their salaries are late despite the center declaring at a teacher’s meeting the opening of a new AESL center in Irbid city and the purchasing of brand new technologically advanced time clocks by the owners/parvenuses who own the AESL Center, why the printers and computers are suddenly not working immediately prior to deadlines for staff paperwork, why their students have no textbooks two weeks before the end of a six week course, why spurious promises by the owners are not fulfilled, why there is a high rate of employee turnover or signs of abuse in employees, and more. However, there is a plus for the employment of such management strategy, though for the owners. It increases the temporary competitiveness of teachers against each other, and thus augments the productivity of the center’s employees until the antagonist or protagonist of a puppeted conflict quits. As one former employee stated,
“I was also put in the office several times with ####, where she told me about other teachers talking badly about me to my students and to the management. Things escalated (by this I mean this behavior continued and got really uncomfortable) and management was always trying to put blame on the teachers. The teachers started feeling very uncomfortable and for some reason the management liked that and fed off of that. They would try to purposely turn teachers against each other even though it really doesn’t make sense to make the work atmosphere of your own center unbearable!!”
Another employee stated,
“She [the female owner ####] proceeded to talk about another teacher at the center – ##### ##### [instructor and former employee] – and how he was to blame for these behavioral issues with the students. She had reason to believe, she said, that the two students and ##### [instructor and former employee] were in some sort of cahoots, and that in general ##### [former employee] had been spreading misinformation throughout the center in order to stir up trouble. I tried to diffuse the situation, and noted that even if ##### [former employee] had said something offhanded, I’m sure it wasn’t malicious. #### [female center owner] looked at me quite seriously and, I quote to the best of my memory, “No, I know ##### [former employee]. He’s been doing stuff like this for a while.”
I proceeded to tell her that those two students in particular do not talk to ##### [former employee] much, and seeing as we spend all of our breaks in the cafeteria together, that ##### [former employee] is a friend of mine and I know him quite well now as both a friend and a teacher, I think I would know best. #### [female owner] persisted with her version of the story, at which point I told her, as softly as I could, that she was wrong, that this specific event has nothing to do with anyone other than myself and the two troublesome students, but thank you very much for helping me deal with the matter.
I was arrested by the unprofessionalism – to think that a manager would talk about an employee to another employee, a relatively new employee at that, and in such an openly antagonistic and divisive manner. It seemed to me her motive was purely factious: she wanted to pit one teacher against another on ad hominem evidence. Such was my suspicion. The facts are all that speak, and whatever the intention was, I took no part in the game.”
