> Personally (living in Japan) I've never experienced something like this, but it does happen.
I have some friends-of-friends living in Japan. It’s interesting to hear their experience with culture evolve over time. They openly admit that they get a free pass around some of the more difficult cultural situations due to not being born and raised originally in Japan.
Hearing their stories has definitely given me a different perspective on some of the overly idealized views of Japan that get repeated online. A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
> A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
That kind of whataboutism is a common issue in politics though. Why can't we all go and look for every field of politics look what other countries do and if what they do is better, then do that as well without taking the worse parts?
For example, look at Switzerland when it comes to education, to Germany's Mittelstand and trades education system for a vibrant and healthy SME business field, to the US for access to venture capital and cutting-edge research, to Austria or Denmark for their pension system, to Japan for public transport reliability...
Typical contracts will require a 1 month period between you announce you're quitting and you effective termination date.
If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer. Otherwise you're into non-accepted vacation territory, which could lead to financial penalties (basically withdrawing your salary, with potential tax adjustements. They could also try to sue you, and given you're fleeing assume they'd get a default judgement for instance)
Then there's all the paperwork you actually want to have properly done by your employer. They're legally obligated to, but it's always harder if you're in adversarial mode.
All in all, you can still quit cold turkey ("bakkure"), but that's a usually a PITA. Getting a pro to negociate a clean separation will be better than just disappearing, if you're not in the mood/capacity to face your employer.
PS; There are magical words that would give any employee an immediate option to never see their employer again. I don't want them in my comments, but anyone interested will find them with a simple search.
The second reddit link above includes an example, where the person has a visa change and would get in trouble with immigration if they continue to remain employed.
If the person was leaving because they accepted an offer from another employer, being on two payrolls simultaneously might also be a problem.
I think the real percentage of employees using a resignation agency is probably lower than 18.6%. Internet surveys tend to be less accurate and I don't know the methodology they've used to select the 800 or so participants.
But companies bullying employees on resignation seems to be a bigger issue than I thought.
Can anyone in Japan share what ground truth looks like around this? Does this churn matter to businesses when they’re in a labor supply shortage? Do these folks have other jobs they’re moving to? Or are they potentially NEETs bailing on being employed?
However I would say that IMO it's another case of foreigners buzzing by depicting boring and common stuff under a "weird Japan" light.
Shitty companies manipulating employees to stop them from resigning is something that exists in any country. And this escalating to the labor authorities or going through a lawyer is not a rare thing anywhere either.
It happens more frequently in Japan because the culture of not being confrontational is strong. The fact that lawyers can afford to specialize in this matter alone is just a logical result of the larger number of customers.
EDIT: I also want to add this: if you have been in a company for a while, you are eventually going to see or hear about how resignation is handled for other employees. If you want to quit and already know that the company is going to harrass you and make your life hell, is it so weird to save your time and mental health to delegate all of that to a dedicated professional?
Does it? You hear stories in the US of people trying to manipulate employees into not quitting or lambasting them for leaving, but trying to actually, seriously deny their ability to quit is nearly unheard of.
> Shitty companies manipulating employees to stop them from resigning is something that exists in any country. And this escalating to the labor authorities or going through a lawyer is not a rare thing anywhere either.
It is? In what other countries are we talking about here where a company escalates to the labor authorities to prevent you from quitting? Usually this kind of thing is reserved to harass visa holders, not native workers.
My gf used one. She had a legal right to quit but it was inconvenient for the company. They refused multiple times, they also gaslit with "what about the children we teach, if you leave the school might have to close" etc. etc.
Using the agency means you do a 10 minute phone call and that's it. You don't even have to work your remaining days or talk to the company ever again. The agencies seem to have some legal powers that a normal person doesn't, or at least in reality they get results much faster and aren't allowed to screw around.
What did amuse me is there's a discount if you use them multiple times.
> The agencies seem to have some legal powers that a normal person doesn't
I suspect the power that they have is actually knowing the law. Also by hiring one the employee has shown they are willing to hire a lawyer, so the employer can't bluff with legal threats. And very few employees are actually going to be worth the trouble to sue
The special powers are probably the following sentence: "sure, you could sue; also, we could check more closely for labor law violations; which would you like?".
A friend of mine recently went through the typical US process of interviewing while he was in a job (Always take the chance to say you're "tending to your elderly family" or some such in these situations) and landed a new position, though it would mean moving from Kyoto to outside Kumamoto.
This was at a Major Electronics Vendor that is known internationally and who produces... "Entertainment devices".
He walked up to his boss, handed his letter of resignation in, and was told "No, you're too critical to this project, I can't accept this." His response was to say "If I'm too critical to this project then you have failed in your duties as a manager, and it would be very inconvenient for you to have to admit that, so you're going to let me go or I'll make it Very Inconvenient for you by telling the whole team you think they're idiots and that the foreigner is the only reason this release will succeed."
He then didn't show up for a month (new job gave him enough time to take a nice, lengthy 3-month vacation to Korea and back) and his old boss kept calling and sms'ing him... On a number he only used for that job.
Based on what I’ve seen and heard (luckily, not experienced), I think it depends on the company. Smaller ones with older management may be both more reliant on the labor and more used to lifetime employment. I suspect there’s probably some maximal fuckiness point. Most companies aren’t like that, but resignation in Japan has a lot of stigma even if everything goes well, so many people will use these services just so they don’t have to deal with it.
The way the culture works there’s no way for the managers to be anything but unfailingly polite to an external party that calls to resign on behalf of the employee.
> Some companies are notorious for resignation difficulties, excessive overtime and intense work pressure. So much so that they are labeled as “black companies.” The problem has become so severe that Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s Labor Standards Bureau has published a list of these companies to warn potential job seekers.
If only they were in a position to do something about it.
Reading this, I was assuming that this behavior was enforced by reference checks for new hires being commonplace. However, the few sources I found in a quick search make it seem like asking/requiring references is a more recent practice due to western influence.
I too was struggling to understand the problem described herr: does unilaterally quitting a job actually harm the employee's future employment prospects inside Japan, or is the problem here just a matter of culturally enforced social stigma?
There are documents that your former employer often needs to provide you for stuff like health insurance. And now suddenly it's some direct confrontation to get a document, while your future employer (Who could still just let you go!) is asking you for a document to move forward. So you're facing a bunch of time pressure in gnarly cases, without many people around to help you out.
There are procedures to get around this stuff but since it's not the common case, when it does happen suddenly you get to learn about labor law.
I think anywhere in the world, when there is active antagonism causing bureaucracy to not be able to move forward, most people freeze up like a deer caught in headlights. Turns out that being a sociopath can be quite helpful for exploiting workers!
So how is it the company can “refuse to let them quit” or “force” an employee to go to a temple? What is the actual enforcement mechanism other than guilt?
Apart from the paperwork that you need to pass on to your next employer, salaries can be structured in a way that makes the base pay rather low, but the yearly income is boosted up to a reasonable level by bonuses, overtime allowance (fixed monthly amount paid whether you work the overtime or not), etc. If the company doesn't want to let someone quit, they can make it financially painful by withholding these things, or subtracting "damages" caused by the employee leaving.
EDIT: Come to think of it I'm actually not 100% sure about the legality of this, but they sure try it!
They can reduce or plain not pay your bonus, yeah. But making the employee pay for "damages", even by subtracting them from remaining pay or bonuses, is very very illegal.
Japanese companies have some culture of bullying and harassment. The laws against it are limited and enforcement is toothless. But yeah, it's mostly ultimately a lack of courage from the employees in question.
It’s definitely illegal, labor rights are pretty strong in Japan. I think your typical Japanese person is just very compliant when faced with an uncomfortable situation and bad bosses abuse that dynamic.
Withholding a letter of recommendation maybe? If the culture truly is such that you get a job in your early 20s and stay there until you retire or die, then presumably a job seeker in their 30s would be virtually unhireable without a good explanation.
You need proof of layooff (離職票) to collect you unemployment benefits. It is illegal not to issue one, but it is possible for the company can cause you some pain in issuing it.
Maybe it's not in spite of but rather because of them?
To me, it seems like if you were designing a brand new society optimized only to maximize the countries GDP, you'd implement the Japanese model - employees who never leave their employers, extremely long work hours and mandatory after work social activities.
China, Japan and SK have all effectively implemented a version of this and their economic growth post WWII has been nothing short of remarkable (China was poorer than Sub Saharan Africa in the 50's).
Obviously, you could say this has not been going very well for Japan more recently but I'd argue the main drawback to this paradigm is the inevitable population implosion.
As with other places, it worked extremely well as long as the society was inherently sexist, and women weren't allowed to have "men's jobs" and were basically forced by society at large to be mothers and homemakers for husbands who were almost never at home and who never spent any time with their kids. With nothing better to do with their lives and time, and reliable birth control not yet invented or easily available, people had lots of kids to keep the system going.
Nowadays, women want to have more meaning in their lives than just being married to some guy they barely know or care about and raising his kids as some kind of servant with 2nd-class citizen rights. This isn't just in Japan, it's in every developed nation. The result of this is a far lower birthrate, so you can't have a super-high GDP for too long; you get a boost at the beginning because nearly 100% of adults can now contribute to GDP, but it burns out in a few decades because there's no one to replace them.
Japan's economic growth started well before World War 2. In fact, Japan wouldn't have been able to fight WW2 against the US for so long if it wasn't a fully industrialized country by that time. The country was devastated after the war (just as Germany was), but it wasn't starting from scratch. Many (if not most) of the large Japanese manufacturing conglomerates of today have been successful zaibatsu before the war, that have been only partially broken down and restructured as keiretsu.
I think it's a compelling story to see Japan, the Asian Tigers (two of them former colonies of Japan, the other two former British colonies) and China as having the same growth story, but I don't think it's the same story in all of these places. Outside commentators love to bring up Confucianism, but Confucianism (just like Christianity or Buddhism) is a pretty ancient philosophy and religion that have seen many iterations and has taken many different, perhaps even contradictory shapes and forms over the years. A certain version of it was extremely influential in Japan during the Edo period, but a modern Japanese would probably cite Confucius directly less than a culturally Chinese person would do. And it's certainly an influence in Japan, but the culture is just so different than China, which had its own local influences (including decades of Communism and a not-so-minor Cultural Revolution which targeted the "Four Olds").
I think the best explanation is that all of these countries (in their respective growth period!) had a good degree of political stability and achieved the necessary level of education. They all exercised government guidance through export-oriented policies, but left enough leeway for private companies to choose their own way (in other words, a heavy dose of government meddling that would make neoliberals blush, but not a full-on command economy). And most of all, the timing was right. These countries started to grow their industry (or rebuild it and re-orient it towards export in Japan's case) while fertility was still high and they were relatively poorer than the countries which bought up their goods. And of course, this all happened while world was rapidly globalizing.
It's easy to miss the complex factors involved and recommend the export-oriented playbook to countries where it won't fit, or to think that the same playbook would work forever. It's also easy to blame culture when the things fail. Within Japan, you'd find many commentators who believe the attitudes during the Showa era (1926-1989) were different and the current generation is just incapable of hard work, innovation or whatever else.
But from all I've read and heard about Showa era businesses, they were far less efficient than current Japanese businesses are. The businesses culture was probably probably less risk-averse, but that aversion is itself partly the result of decades of having a somewhat stagnant economy. My pet theory is that Japan was successful during its economic miracle period DESPITE the vast inefficiencies of its corporate culture. It only had western economies to compete with (the Asian Tigers hadn't started to roar yet and China was still far away from industrialization) and the wages in Japan were initially far lower than in the US. From various productivity metrics inefficiencies in other Western countries probably weren't much different back then (this tracks, since it all happened before the mass digitization of the workplace and government which Japan was late to). and despite management, office work and sales practices being inefficient, Japanese companies (most famously Toyota) have developed innovative methods for increasing efficiency and quality on the factory floor.
Fast forward to the 1990s, and Japan is seeing fierce competition from other cheaper producers on many products even before the baby boomer generation is facing retirement with a shrinking population. During that period rich economies are improving their productivity, while poorer economies can just undercut prices due to cheaper labor. Toyota's innovative manufacturing methods are getting adopted outside Japan as well. Japan still leads in places where it has technology advantages or even just a brand or market capture, but in general competition just becomes a lot harder.
At this point, mature economies can only do so much. No matter what the government and individual corporations do, we cannot expect anything close to the growth rates of the 1950s-1970s again. But inefficiencies are clearly hurting Japanese businesses.
This isn't ineficiency though, probably closer to bullying.
Quitting a job has no complex moving parts, and most corporation will deal with it with minimal paperwork (you really only need to prove you gave them your resignation. An email reply would be enough legally).
The issues these new graduates (the source of the TFA is MyNavi, which is new graduate centric) are facing are arbitrary, purposefuly set to make their life harder.
W.r.t quitting jobs, the economic inefficiency is that knowledge doesnt diffuse properly. A certain amount of corporate mobility is hugely beneficial. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for bad corporate culture; the social binge drinking, poor sleep, no social life, etc must be bad for productivity... I don't understand how they manage it.
Is that a cause, though? I can see both as being consequences of the sheer amount of money sloshing around in the Silicon Valley. It generally helps things because there’s just so much resources to tap. It also helps employees getting poached with better salaries and compensation. But it does not mean that it can be replicated that way in another country.
It works by having it beaten into for you several decades of your childhood that you don't speak up, you put the groups first, and appearances trump reality.
I don't necessarily think it's any better or any worse than western culture. My perspective is "it just has different failure modes".
I don't understand, what really constitutes a "won't let me quit" scenario? If I hand in my resignation, I don't really care whether my employer rips it or not. I consider my contract terminated because it's a contract that can be terminated by either party to the contract. If I have a notice period, I'll work that period, then stop showing up. If they want to consider the contract as still valid, they can. And then they'd have to pay me, but I don't see why they would if I'm not turning up to work? There must be something in the above reasoning that isn't correct?
You probably wouldn't also give your letter of resignation with your knees on the floor, asking the boss to "forgive me because i failed you", right ?
Yes, japan is a whole different mentality, with a completely different set of values and social norms ( mostly focused on "don't show disrespect to others", and "don't embarrass yourself"). Traveling from japan to the US/Hawaii was probably where i experienced the largest culture shock (and not in a flattering way for americans). It felt like going from civilization to barbaric lands.
On the other hand i can see why some japanese people can't handle that much pressure on their everyday behavior and prefer the western mentality at some point in their life.
Imagine you have a strong deference to authority and an incredible fear of confrontation. It would be very easy for someone in a position of authority to take advantage of you.
People don't always do what's in their best interest. People talk to the police without a lawyer all the time. People sign away their rights just because they don't want to push back on things. It takes guts to stand up for yourself.
The difference is cultural. The Japanese salaryman believes he is committing a shamefully grave social and professional sin by resigning, so when his employer refuses to accept the resignation, that refusal has moral force.
Readit News
Personally (living in Japan) I've never experienced something like this, but it does happen.
I have some friends-of-friends living in Japan. It’s interesting to hear their experience with culture evolve over time. They openly admit that they get a free pass around some of the more difficult cultural situations due to not being born and raised originally in Japan.
Hearing their stories has definitely given me a different perspective on some of the overly idealized views of Japan that get repeated online. A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
That kind of whataboutism is a common issue in politics though. Why can't we all go and look for every field of politics look what other countries do and if what they do is better, then do that as well without taking the worse parts?
For example, look at Switzerland when it comes to education, to Germany's Mittelstand and trades education system for a vibrant and healthy SME business field, to the US for access to venture capital and cutting-edge research, to Austria or Denmark for their pension system, to Japan for public transport reliability...
If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer. Otherwise you're into non-accepted vacation territory, which could lead to financial penalties (basically withdrawing your salary, with potential tax adjustements. They could also try to sue you, and given you're fleeing assume they'd get a default judgement for instance)
Then there's all the paperwork you actually want to have properly done by your employer. They're legally obligated to, but it's always harder if you're in adversarial mode.
All in all, you can still quit cold turkey ("bakkure"), but that's a usually a PITA. Getting a pro to negociate a clean separation will be better than just disappearing, if you're not in the mood/capacity to face your employer.
PS; There are magical words that would give any employee an immediate option to never see their employer again. I don't want them in my comments, but anyone interested will find them with a simple search.
If the person was leaving because they accepted an offer from another employer, being on two payrolls simultaneously might also be a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
But companies bullying employees on resignation seems to be a bigger issue than I thought.
However I would say that IMO it's another case of foreigners buzzing by depicting boring and common stuff under a "weird Japan" light.
Shitty companies manipulating employees to stop them from resigning is something that exists in any country. And this escalating to the labor authorities or going through a lawyer is not a rare thing anywhere either.
It happens more frequently in Japan because the culture of not being confrontational is strong. The fact that lawyers can afford to specialize in this matter alone is just a logical result of the larger number of customers.
EDIT: I also want to add this: if you have been in a company for a while, you are eventually going to see or hear about how resignation is handled for other employees. If you want to quit and already know that the company is going to harrass you and make your life hell, is it so weird to save your time and mental health to delegate all of that to a dedicated professional?
I have never heard of it in the US. I’m sure some examples exist but I’d be really unpleasantly surprised if it’s a major social issue here.
It is? In what other countries are we talking about here where a company escalates to the labor authorities to prevent you from quitting? Usually this kind of thing is reserved to harass visa holders, not native workers.
Using the agency means you do a 10 minute phone call and that's it. You don't even have to work your remaining days or talk to the company ever again. The agencies seem to have some legal powers that a normal person doesn't, or at least in reality they get results much faster and aren't allowed to screw around.
What did amuse me is there's a discount if you use them multiple times.
I suspect the power that they have is actually knowing the law. Also by hiring one the employee has shown they are willing to hire a lawyer, so the employer can't bluff with legal threats. And very few employees are actually going to be worth the trouble to sue
This was at a Major Electronics Vendor that is known internationally and who produces... "Entertainment devices".
He walked up to his boss, handed his letter of resignation in, and was told "No, you're too critical to this project, I can't accept this." His response was to say "If I'm too critical to this project then you have failed in your duties as a manager, and it would be very inconvenient for you to have to admit that, so you're going to let me go or I'll make it Very Inconvenient for you by telling the whole team you think they're idiots and that the foreigner is the only reason this release will succeed."
He then didn't show up for a month (new job gave him enough time to take a nice, lengthy 3-month vacation to Korea and back) and his old boss kept calling and sms'ing him... On a number he only used for that job.
The way the culture works there’s no way for the managers to be anything but unfailingly polite to an external party that calls to resign on behalf of the employee.
If only they were in a position to do something about it.
I'd guess it's just guilt and shame?
There are procedures to get around this stuff but since it's not the common case, when it does happen suddenly you get to learn about labor law.
I think anywhere in the world, when there is active antagonism causing bureaucracy to not be able to move forward, most people freeze up like a deer caught in headlights. Turns out that being a sociopath can be quite helpful for exploiting workers!
EDIT: Come to think of it I'm actually not 100% sure about the legality of this, but they sure try it!
But the again - these agencies might be solving an entirely different problem.
To me, it seems like if you were designing a brand new society optimized only to maximize the countries GDP, you'd implement the Japanese model - employees who never leave their employers, extremely long work hours and mandatory after work social activities.
China, Japan and SK have all effectively implemented a version of this and their economic growth post WWII has been nothing short of remarkable (China was poorer than Sub Saharan Africa in the 50's).
Obviously, you could say this has not been going very well for Japan more recently but I'd argue the main drawback to this paradigm is the inevitable population implosion.
Nowadays, women want to have more meaning in their lives than just being married to some guy they barely know or care about and raising his kids as some kind of servant with 2nd-class citizen rights. This isn't just in Japan, it's in every developed nation. The result of this is a far lower birthrate, so you can't have a super-high GDP for too long; you get a boost at the beginning because nearly 100% of adults can now contribute to GDP, but it burns out in a few decades because there's no one to replace them.
Societies need to come up with a new model.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/jap....
You can describe that as ‘recently’, but it’s an entire generation.
Of course you'll copy the US's model. In terms of GDP, the US has been doing so much better than the rest of the world in the last several decades.
I think it's a compelling story to see Japan, the Asian Tigers (two of them former colonies of Japan, the other two former British colonies) and China as having the same growth story, but I don't think it's the same story in all of these places. Outside commentators love to bring up Confucianism, but Confucianism (just like Christianity or Buddhism) is a pretty ancient philosophy and religion that have seen many iterations and has taken many different, perhaps even contradictory shapes and forms over the years. A certain version of it was extremely influential in Japan during the Edo period, but a modern Japanese would probably cite Confucius directly less than a culturally Chinese person would do. And it's certainly an influence in Japan, but the culture is just so different than China, which had its own local influences (including decades of Communism and a not-so-minor Cultural Revolution which targeted the "Four Olds").
I think the best explanation is that all of these countries (in their respective growth period!) had a good degree of political stability and achieved the necessary level of education. They all exercised government guidance through export-oriented policies, but left enough leeway for private companies to choose their own way (in other words, a heavy dose of government meddling that would make neoliberals blush, but not a full-on command economy). And most of all, the timing was right. These countries started to grow their industry (or rebuild it and re-orient it towards export in Japan's case) while fertility was still high and they were relatively poorer than the countries which bought up their goods. And of course, this all happened while world was rapidly globalizing.
It's easy to miss the complex factors involved and recommend the export-oriented playbook to countries where it won't fit, or to think that the same playbook would work forever. It's also easy to blame culture when the things fail. Within Japan, you'd find many commentators who believe the attitudes during the Showa era (1926-1989) were different and the current generation is just incapable of hard work, innovation or whatever else.
But from all I've read and heard about Showa era businesses, they were far less efficient than current Japanese businesses are. The businesses culture was probably probably less risk-averse, but that aversion is itself partly the result of decades of having a somewhat stagnant economy. My pet theory is that Japan was successful during its economic miracle period DESPITE the vast inefficiencies of its corporate culture. It only had western economies to compete with (the Asian Tigers hadn't started to roar yet and China was still far away from industrialization) and the wages in Japan were initially far lower than in the US. From various productivity metrics inefficiencies in other Western countries probably weren't much different back then (this tracks, since it all happened before the mass digitization of the workplace and government which Japan was late to). and despite management, office work and sales practices being inefficient, Japanese companies (most famously Toyota) have developed innovative methods for increasing efficiency and quality on the factory floor.
Fast forward to the 1990s, and Japan is seeing fierce competition from other cheaper producers on many products even before the baby boomer generation is facing retirement with a shrinking population. During that period rich economies are improving their productivity, while poorer economies can just undercut prices due to cheaper labor. Toyota's innovative manufacturing methods are getting adopted outside Japan as well. Japan still leads in places where it has technology advantages or even just a brand or market capture, but in general competition just becomes a lot harder.
At this point, mature economies can only do so much. No matter what the government and individual corporations do, we cannot expect anything close to the growth rates of the 1950s-1970s again. But inefficiencies are clearly hurting Japanese businesses.
Quitting a job has no complex moving parts, and most corporation will deal with it with minimal paperwork (you really only need to prove you gave them your resignation. An email reply would be enough legally).
The issues these new graduates (the source of the TFA is MyNavi, which is new graduate centric) are facing are arbitrary, purposefuly set to make their life harder.
Meanwhile American software companies and employees are both infamously disloyal and have done quite well.
I don't necessarily think it's any better or any worse than western culture. My perspective is "it just has different failure modes".
Yes, japan is a whole different mentality, with a completely different set of values and social norms ( mostly focused on "don't show disrespect to others", and "don't embarrass yourself"). Traveling from japan to the US/Hawaii was probably where i experienced the largest culture shock (and not in a flattering way for americans). It felt like going from civilization to barbaric lands.
On the other hand i can see why some japanese people can't handle that much pressure on their everyday behavior and prefer the western mentality at some point in their life.
People don't always do what's in their best interest. People talk to the police without a lawyer all the time. People sign away their rights just because they don't want to push back on things. It takes guts to stand up for yourself.
> "I can't quit the job. If I say I'm going to quit, I'll be threatened that I will have to pay damages for quitting."