What the law owes you

Known as the regalía pascual, the salario de Navidad, or just el doble sueldo. Article 219 of the labor code sets it: add up the ordinary salaries you earned during the calendar year and divide by twelve. That is what you are owed, and it has to be paid no later than December 20.

• •It is not discretionary and it does not depend on performance or on the school having a good year. A school that calls it a bonus it may or may not give is wrong about the law.
• •If you did not work the whole year, you get the proportional share for the months you did.
• •It is free of income tax and of social security deductions, so the figure you are owed is the figure you should receive.
• •The amount is capped at five minimum wages. The minimum wage changes by decree and varies by sector, so the cap is a rule rather than a fixed number.
• •It is based on ordinary salary, so overtime and one-off payments are not part of the calculation.

Article 177: once you complete a year of continuous service you are entitled to fourteen working days of vacation, with salary. Below a year there is a scale, and it is the part most teachers do not know they can claim.

• •The vacation salary is paid the day before the vacation starts, not at the end of the month (Art. 181).
• •You may not work for another employer during it, paid or unpaid (Art. 182).
• •If you leave a school without having taken vacation you were entitled to, you are owed the cash equivalent. That holds whatever the reason you left (Art. 182).
• •Employers are supposed to set and distribute everyone's vacation periods during the first fifteen days of January (Art. 186). If nobody has told you when yours is, that is worth asking in January rather than in June.

Contributions to the Dominican social security system come out of payroll. From the employee side the rates are 3.04% of the contributory salary to the family health plan and 2.87% to the pension fund, roughly 5.9% in total. The employer pays its own share on top, which is substantially larger, plus labor-risk insurance.

• •Look at your payslip. If no SFS or AFP deduction appears and you are on a regular contract, you may not be enrolled, which means no health coverage through the job and nothing accruing toward a pension.
• •You can check your own status directly with the TSS rather than taking the school's word for it.
• •The rates and the contributory ceilings are set by the TSS and are adjusted, so treat the percentages above as current rather than permanent.
• •Hourly and informal arrangements are where enrollment most often quietly does not happen. If it matters to you, settle it before you start, in writing.

Article 223 requires employers to share ten percent of annual net profits with workers on indefinite contracts, within the limits that article sets. Whether your school owes it depends on whether there are net profits to share, so it is worth asking how it is handled rather than assuming either way.

If you are dismissed without just cause, notice and severance (preaviso and cesantía) are owed on a scale that grows with length of service, under Articles 76 and 80. Resigning is treated differently from being dismissed, which is why signing a resignation letter you did not write is a costly thing to do without advice.

Not law, just the list of things whose absence causes the arguments. Most hourly teaching arrangements here are agreed verbally, and every item below is one somebody has lost money on.

• •The hourly rate, and whether it is per clock hour or per class period, which may be fifty minutes.
• •How many hours a week are guaranteed, as opposed to offered if enrollment holds.
• •Whether planning, grading, placement testing and parent meetings are paid, and at what rate.
• •What happens during exam weeks, school holidays and the summer.
• •Whether substitution hours are paid, and whether you can decline them.
• •Who buys books and materials, and whether you are reimbursed.
• •How much notice either side gives, and how the hours can be reduced.
• •Whether social security enrollment is included, and from when.

The Ministry of Labor handles complaints and mediates, and its regional offices will hear a case brought by one worker. Before going anywhere, write down what happened and when, and keep payslips, messages and your contract. Most of what makes these cases winnable is documentation that was kept at the time rather than reconstructed afterward.