Many would see the corporate package of a western expat banker working in Asia as an enviable proposition – a hefty salary with significant bonuses, housing allowance, international school for the kids, health insurance and so on.
So what’s the catch? Well I was told by the partner of a high-level executive in an international bank that these expat packages are not merely designed to attract ‘top talent’, but are specifically engineered with one key goal in mind – to create leverage over their new hires.
You may be aware that international schools in key Asian international cities are prohibitively expensive – think $40,000 USD per child, per year, before debentures, capital levies and so on. One reason these schools are so expensive that is that the big banks and multinationals routinely pre-buy blocks of slots every year in order to distribute to the families of their expat employees.
The management technique, then, goes like this: HR brings a guy – let’s call him Ken – over from the US with his wife and kids. They get the local work visa approved, and they get Ken all settled into the big apartment – all covered under their housing allowance. A couple of months in, Ken’s wife is making friends at the yacht club, she’s got the domestic helper all trained up on the grocery shopping, and the kids are all in school. By the time 6 months have passed, his wife has a healthy social calendar, the kids friends’ parents are also her friends, and most importantly: the kids have stopped complaining incessantly about going back home, because they’ve finally started to make some good friends at school. This is when Ken’s boss first asks him to come into the office on a Saturday.
As soon as this happens, Ken intuitively knows he’s screwed. He knows this isn’t a one-off.. it’s not a favour to a mate.. he’s getting punked out in the prison shower.
What’s he going to say – no? If he loses this job, he knows there’s no way he’s going to be able to find a replacement position with that kind of salary and benefit package. Will his wife want to run back home to the US with their tails between their legs? They’ve just spent the last half a year humble-bragging on facebook about how lucky they are to have a domestic helper and a personal driver in this tropical paradise.
It is possible that if he really hustles, Ken may be able to find some kind of replacement role at another firm with a workable salary, but there would need to be serious cutbacks. He may be able to convince the wife to move into a smaller apartment, he could let go of his driver, sell his car, give up his yacht club membership, cut down on the restaurants and start riding the subway.
A cost-saving measure he likely will NOT be able to pull off, is convincing his wife to get his kids – now that they’ve all finally settled into a foreign country and made some friends – to leave their hyper-expensive international school, and transfer to a cheap local one where they won’t even be able to speak the language.
Every other perk and luxury, he could theoretically decide to ditch. Ultimately these things are really just luxuries for him, and – practically speaking – not worth the cost. The ‘cost’ of course, being the burden of 24/7 slavery to upper management who have full knowledge that they have you directly in their pocket.
The genius of the package’s complimentary ‘high-end’ schooling, is that the school slots are not HIS perk to give up. Ken’s dilemma, then, is to either rip the kids out of school and create a domestic nightmare for himself, or to be financially destroyed trying to pay the absurd ‘market rates’ for kids’ schooling which – ironically – he used to get for ‘free’.
For these reasons, when Ken’s boss casually asks him on Friday morning if he minds coming in on Saturday – he already has a pretty good idea what that answer is going to be.
