Regarding Hikaru Maeda's Sept. 30 letter, "English school has been good to us": The writer's comment that "it is a shame that Nova has been so criticized by the media" is very naive. As a Nova "Titled Instructor," I can affirm that all Nova teachers were relieved when the media finally brought the nonpayment of our salaries to the attention of the media. Media pressure tends to make institutions do the right thing.
The day after the story on nonpayment of salaries broke, Titled Instructors were paid, albeit two weeks late. Sadly, teachers who were evicted from their apartments due to Nova's nonpayment of rent have no consolation, and thousands of Japanese staff members are still waiting to be paid.
More media attention is needed to to make sure that Nova does the right thing: namely, to pay its workers on a fixed schedule, or if it is indeed insolvent, to quickly declare bankruptcy so that its suffering employees may begin to receive unemployment benefits.
I fear that for students it may already be too late to claim refunds. Mismanagement of the company is such that we don't have the capacity either to teach our students or to refund them their money. Had the media paid more attention to what management was doing earlier on, perhaps we could have avoided the current mess.
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