500 euro notes

Learn to write. You said, 'always expect... ...the hardly legal and the downright unethical when working overseas.'
Not 'often', or 'sometimes', or 'frequently'. Year 5 Literacy.
Why does a kindly old cove like me get all snotty about this?
Because the forum is read not just by us old lags and serial jesters, but also by newcomers to the whole idea of venturing to another country. It is grossly unfair on what (I would venture) is a majority of decent schools across the globe, to be tarred with the same brush.
We all know that there are certain employers in Spain who treat teachers as seasonal migrant workers. They probably wouldn't get away with it if there were not a plentiful supply of teachers prepared to behave as such. But it's been just as clear, reading comments on Spain over the years, that while salaries there are low - if you want to become a slum landlord beck in the UK, you neeed to look further afield - there are reputable schools that behave ethically.
To be conciliatory, serverservant, your aspirations are normal, modest and shared by us all:

Fair enough, indeed. And as for

I emphatically do not think it is OK and have never said so. I do think that six months is a crazily short time either for an employee to be conceded lifelong rights or for that employee to start buying a house and settliing in for the long run.

I'm genuinely puzzled by this EU Law concept.
Spain is in the EU, yet employers get away with the practices you describe. Ruritania is in the EU, yet we have a national Labour Code (this year's edition runs to 1,600 spellbinding pages) which tells us we can offer two one-year contracts, after which the employee attains permanence.
And 'permanence' like 'always', is a big strong word.

Sorry to keep on being contradictory, but in my neck of the woods, once an employee has rounded the two-year mark it is well-nigh impossible to get rid of him/her on grounds of incompetence, however carefully documented.
If that person has no shame, s/he can blithely carry on being a burden to students and colleagues for year after year. 'Just cause' for dismissal can only be found in unethical actions like theft, cheating, drunkenness-on-the-job or inappropriate amorous involvement with a student, not in merely being p*ss-poor at your job.
Never (no, never) would we

but we would like, very occasionally, to have more power to persuade incompetents that the game is over. If you have such a mechanism in Germany, all well and good, but it doesn't exist here.
Maybe the TES could hire a lawyer to join us on the forum, and (for £396 plus VAT per line) explain to us just where the EU has overall jurisdiction in labour law, and just where the peculiarities of each country take over. Then another lawyer would sail in with a different, though equally costly, opinion.
I'm sincerely delighted that after six disappointing countries you have found peace, fulfilment and security in Germany, serverservant. So have I, and many of my colleagues, in Ruritania. Because you certainly need not always expect 'overseas' schools to deliver the 'hardly legal and the downright unethical'.

 

Hi Dude
Liking to , ahem, watch, these days more than contribute and as an occasional watcher at that, having got bored of reading about Champions League, I was intrigued by your comments about your pension.
You seem to take it as a given that the fragments you have shored against your ruin will not appear...what are you planning to do to carry you through your dotage, give that you are half way through your six decade ( and it seems like only....when you were a 37 year old pup).
As I am half way through my 5th, and increasingly grizzled myself, it is a question to the fore. I can no longer grow an alluring goatee, as it comes out a curious mixture of grey, ginger (ye Gods...) and clashes with the "strawberry-blonde" tresses that themselves exist in cruel juxta-postion with the pinky-pink flesh of my dime-sized "pelado".
A slight off-piste comment, but what will you do my Bristol Rovers supporting compiche...???

 

Good to read you again, old yellow-and-brown job.
To get the important thing said first, it's City, not Rovers.
Now - pensions. My pessimism is an insurance against disappointment. Like starting the new season kind of taking it for granted that City will not lift the FA Cup. This way, if TP and Ruritania do come up with a bucket of coal and a side of bacon and a nubile health visitor with a soapy sponge every now and then during my dotage, it will be a pleasant surprise.
Even so, there will be a hole in the TP pension, representing those wonderful 13 years in South America. We have the current residence in a suburb of Ruritania's capital - losing value, but paid for - and a flat in a posh Yorkshire town bequeathed by sorely lamented mother-in-law (losing value and still paying off Gordon Brown's share). But no tenement pullulating with immigrants in St Paul's or Stockwell - or is that also a mixed blessing in these apocalyptic times?
We'd be absolutely fine, still among the top 10% of the world's fortunate - but there'd be no luxuries.
And the worst case? TP and Ruritania fail to deliver on all those hard-earned contributions?
By no means impossible.
I'd like to think that as a spartan intellectual aesthete I will just about survive. A cabbage and cilantro patch in the garden, a fascinating female post-grad sociology student renting the upstairs bedroom, a slow-burning log on the fire, a poncho over my shoulders and a rug on my knees, vegetable soup on the hob, Wagner on Radio Three, and before my thick lenses the text of Proust or Penthouse.
But just now I'm worth more dead than alive. One headlong plunge off a barstool tomorrow, and between the life insurance and the TP, Mrs D. and the Dudinha cop a sum sufficient to see the Lady through her Masters, the Babe through her undergraduate degree, and still leave them something over for shopping in London, Buenos Aires or Nempnett Thrubwell.
I'm guessing there are others here in just these straits who can, like, relate to this, or I wouldn't have written at such length in public.
To return to the private, Peñarol, count yourself lucky it's your pelado and not your carajo that is dime-sized right now.. but wait for your sixth decade...
Big abrazo to you and yours. Our respective national teams play bum-sniff here in November - if you can come over with los boys, mi casa es tu casa che.,