> "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."
Interestingly, this is actually possible under Japanese law/legal precedent. If an employee, for example, decides to put in notice and then half-ass their job until their departure date, a company could actually sue the employee and win.
Other Japan-labor-law fun fact: if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date. Hope you like that job you signed onto!
The majority of developed countries have subtle versions of this. I was naive about this before I worked outside the US and saw the practical impact. The chains go both ways and have real downsides.
Having seen the perverse incentives this creates and the various ways in which it can be abused, I have come to the conclusion that the American “at-will” employment model is actually a good thing and benefits workers. No one should discount the value of having the power to tell your employer to fuck off at a moment’s notice with no practical repercussions. No one should be required to stay in an abusive relationship a moment longer than they wish to.
>No one should discount the value of having the power to tell your employer to fuck off at a moment’s notice with no practical repercussions.
I think you are confusing "it is possible" with "it is common". Never heard of people in Japan get sued for quitting, even with shady English teaching centers. But definitely seen companies do them for scare tactics though.
The US compensates for their lassiez-faire employment model with their gym memberships and other subscriptions, which are harder to get out of than Japanese companies.
I think your opinion is influenced by probability being a well off professional in a field where you can easily find another job, maybe phisical location is not even that important.
Just an hypothesis.
I prefer the "chains on both sides" approach for the society.
I’d say in the US there is a unique situation because health care is tied to employment, or it’s insanely expensive. When the job market is not great, you see increased costs and more exploitation of those employed.
I was stunned when I realised my Irish work contracts had a forced notice period, not just a courtesy. Accenture uses this as a tool to stop people quitting - forced three month notice even for super low level employees. Makes it hard to interview for new jobs!
At will employment coupled with a universal healthcare system would have been the best system for America, but as we know, that's an impossibility now.
Many countries let the worker be at will effectively, the employer can only fire them for cause or redundancy or a proper PIP. However the worker can't sue for much if they are unfairly dismissed, so no company is too on tbe hook. Which is good because it would reduce jobs. Add universal healthcare and social security and it's an OK system. Althouth the SS may not actually be enough to live off.
> Having seen the perverse incentives this creates and the various ways in which it can be abused
Could you list any examples? Because I honestly don't see any way where potentially getting fired for no reason on the spot would be the beneficial option that you claim.
I've btw never heard of anyone where I live getting sued or unable to quit a job.
1. While it is technically true a company could sue a worker for quitting, the amount of damages they'd have to show is far beyond anything they'd be able to do outside of an upper management position. As far as I know, you could not sue someone for doing a half assed job.
2. I'm not even sure how you are using the word "illegal" here. AFAIK there is no provisions in criminal law for punishing people who break employment contracts. What I assume you are talking about is that a contract worker is bound by the terms of their contract as far as notice to quit goes, but there are a couple of limits to this.
- This only applies in the first year of the contract. After the contract has been renewed once, standard Japanese labor law applies, which is two weeks of notice.
- Similar to the above statement about suing someone for quitting, Japanese law only allows for suits to be for actual damages, so the company would have to prove significant damages to make the suit worth it. Contract workers are generally not high value employees so it would be unusual for one to be worth suing over.
A judge would automatically throw out the case if this was the argument for suing an employee. The reasoning being, if you continued to pay the employee during the term of their employment, and you knew that the employee was not performing based on some KPI or some yard stick, you would issue warning to the employee to improve their performance, or you would fire the employee on the spot. Continuing keep an underperforming employee is giving tactic consent that their work is reasonably acceptable because if it wasn't, you would start disciplinary action or cease their employment.
Threating a employee with coercive threats (such as threats of legal action) is going to land the business into hot water in any modern society.
To balance this comment, if you are a full time employee you are super well protected and cannot be fired for any reason other than gross negligence or actively breaking the law.
Managing out a poor performer in Japan is a grinding process that can easily take two years from start to finish
> "Bandai Namco reportedly tries to bore staff into quitting, skirting Japan’s labor laws"
> Canceling some game projects and shuttering existing ones has helped, but facing the need for further adjustments, Bandai Namco has reportedly turned to the unspoken Japanese tradition of layoff-by-boredom by stuffing unwanted employees into oidashi beya, or "expulsion rooms."
> Do a quick online search for oidashi beya and you'll see plenty of websites explaining the practice, or otherwise discussing how difficult it is to fire people in Japan thanks to strong labor protections. It's not a new practice, either: For those that haven't been reading the Reg for the past 11 years, we even wrote about it way back in 2013 as a wave of the practice swept through Japan and hit tech workers at companies reportedly including Panasonic, Sony and other firms.
At a US F500 company, HR can still make it onerous to get rid of an underperforming employee. Wants multiple documented poor reviews to avoid any potential for follow-up legal action (which seems incredibly unlikely, but HR wants to cover their butts).
> If an employee, for example, decides to put in notice and then half-ass their job until their departure date, a company could actually sue the employee and win.
That sounds rather exaggerated. There may have been cases of an employee being sued for damages by their a employer for not performing their jobs well, but I've personally never heard of them and without digging deep into courts records, I doubt there are many of these.
The reason I highly doubt that, is that even just firing employees in Japan who are half-assing their job requires going to court and providing ample evidence that the employee has been continuously under-performing even though they were notified, given opportunity and failed to improve.
This standard is considered so high, that Japanese companies rarely fire employees for this type of reason (Ordinary termination 普通解雇 futsuu kaiko). When companies absolutely want to get rid of a certain employee, they often prefer to slowly make the employee's life miserable by giving them them demeaning tasks (or in some cases just no tasks at all!), bullying them and cutting their pay — a practice generally called iyagarase (roughly translated as "making someone feeling unpleasant"). That kind of play can also land the employer in legal trouble, but at least the burden of proof would fall on the employee. In many other cases still, companies just keep around employees that are under performing or convince them to take an voluntary retirement package.
In addition to all of that, employment contracts generally require a 30 day notice before quitting in Japan (I guess this is the maximum set by law). Combine that with the fact that most employees tend to have at least 14 days of unused leave accumulated, which they'd use just before leaving, they're not left with so enough working days in which they can half-ass their jobs.
I'm not quite sure about breaking your contract for contract employees, but it the original example ("I'll be threatened that I will have to pay damages for quitting") doesn't seem like a contract employee, and the term "black companies" and the discourse around usually refers to full-time employment. It's probably just threats, as the quote says. Managers sometimes say the craziest things to scare their companies out of quitting.
> If an employee, for example, decides to put in notice and then half-ass their job until their departure date,
Suppose you are fired, and the company decides unilaterally to halve your salary during the notice period, wouldn't you get nasty about it?
> if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date
As long as it is illegal for the company to fire you as well, I don't see any problem. Why should a party of a contract be free to breach it at will while the other remains constrained?
> I don't see any problem. Why should a party of a contract be free to breach it at will while the other remains constrained?
Companies are run to make money, while people usually enter employment contracts in order to have money to feed their families and survive. Humans usually come to the consensus that people are more important than profits.
A company doesn't need to be doing anything illegal for the working conditions to be unsafe. I am still boycotting Paris Baguette and their sister companies because of their stubbornness and refusal to go beyond the legal minimums in safety equipment.
2 years ago a 23-year old employee got pulled into a sauce making machine and was crushed to death, with nobody finding her body until the next day. Let's say you are a bright 22-year old from the Philippines who got offered 3x your peers salary for working at an industrial bakery. It doesn't sound so bad right? Now let's say your friend got killed by machinery, and the company refuses to take responsibility because the safety equipment that could have prevented their death was optional and not legally required. You're 4 months into your 12-month contract. Do you have enough money to even get a flight back home? Do you have enough money to break your contract and pay the company for your flight from your home country, pay the company for breaking your subsidized lease in the dorms, etc? No you don't. That is a bad situation to be in. If it were me I would break the contract and just never come back to Korea. They're not going to extradite you for this debt, but does everyone know that? Especially migrant workers?
Now I know this is about Japan and not Korea. Look into how many Vietnamese go work in the textile industry in Japan and get injured. Should there really be more barriers and intimidation when it comes to forcing the workers to stay for the duration of their contract when their roommate was crippled by the machinery? Or should it be easier for people to leave potentially dangerous situations?
---
This also applies to white collar workers. Do you know how many Indian college students are lured to go work at a Japanese company with the promise of a high salary, only to then move to Tokyo and realize they're spending way more money than they expected due to the higher COL? Companies absolutely take advantage of this system. In the US companies usually only offer contracts to highly skilled workers, while in other countries companies offer contracts in order to trap individuals into poor working conditions and being underpaid when they're naive to the job market.
I live in Japan and while also not a lawyer I've had experiences with the labor bureau - this is totally false, and even explicitly stated in the Labor Standards Act:
"Article 5: An employer must not force a worker to work against their will through the use of physical violence, intimidation, confinement, or any other means that unjustly restricts that worker's mental or physical freedom.
...
Article 16: An employer must not form a contract that prescribes a monetary penalty for breach of a labor contract or establishes the amount of compensation for loss or damage in advance."
This explicitly applies to contract workers (契約社員) too, and protections for employees (正社員) are so strong that it can often take months of documentation to dismiss someone. Whether people know they have these protections, knew they had them before they sign something their company gives them or feel comfortable actually reporting when a company has violated them is a different story. But basic salary is protected strongly enough that most Japanese companies heavily weight compensation on annual/semi-annual bonuses, housing allowances etc... (which are not protected).
I think this is only a prohibition on liquidated damages clauses though (plus making the act of even writing a penalty clause, which are already unenforceable, unlawful).
It doesn't appear to be an exclusion of actual damages due to e.g. a one year contract worker quitting after 6 months, if it actually caused their employer damages.
> a company could actually sue the employee and win.
It's difficult and costs money to prove that someone is half-assing their job on purpose, and that cost a company a specific dollar amount of losses. It's why they may threaten to sue, but rarely do.
> Other Japan-labor-law fun fact: if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date. Hope you like that job you signed onto!
It's technically a contract violation, but there are many exceptions that allow you to quit within the first year, and that's assuming the company is totally above board legally (hint: if it's a black company, then they aren't.)
All this has gone a long way to make me feel better about not keeping up my Japanese language skills after university. My youthful deep reverence for Japan and its culture shifted into realpolitik as I learned more and more, and I think another watch of Fear And Trembling is in order…
I kinda want to go there and purchase a 10k house in a village and chill. It’s basically a place where you can retire. I know a bunch of white people who have already done this.
Just like how Japan isn’t characterized fully by anime it’s not fully characterized by corporate culture either.
Constitution of Japan, Article 18, prohibition of forced labor. So "illegal" isn't the right word.
While damages are theoretically possible for leaving a fixed term employment contract early (with an exception after one year has passed), I'd be very interested in the precedent you're talking of, regarding an actual case of a contract employee being sued for quitting early.
Only case I found was the K's International case, 1992, where an employee quit after 4 days, and the employer sued and was awarded damages (amount unknown) due to the disruption it caused. I couldn't find any further details though.
I still remember the day of the explosion down the road from our office in Nagoya. The worker had been driven to such desperation and rage that he sealed himself off in the boss's office after dousing everything (including himself) in gasoline.
The cops were there, trying to talk him down, but the fumes had reached such a concentration that the next time the aircon kicked in, the place exploded.
The worker exploitation in Japan is BAD, and has been for decades. When you employ someone, you don't technically own them, but culturally you absolutely do.
The advert will perfectly select for the type of person they actually want: an obsessive crank who is already independently wealthy and posting about government waste on Twitter 24/7. I'm surprised they haven't offered catturd2 a cabinet post yet.
Matt Levine covered what was an absolutte banger of a press release from JPMorgan
> JPMorgan Chase & Co. will limit junior banker hours to 80 per week in most cases, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Exceptions may include extra work to complete live deals, the person said.
My favorite part if the analysis was by far
> If there is nothing particularly urgent for you to do, it’s fine for you to come in at 9 a.m. and leave at midnight Monday through Friday and work just one afternoon per weekend, but obviously if you’re on a deal you’ll need to do more.
The thing is, Musk claims to work that hard himself (or more), but the difference is that he is a direct beneficiary and earns millions per hour. Whereas a regular employee earns X amount per month, that's it. Maybe some scraps in stock market value, but one of Musk's tweets has more of an impact on those than a career of 80 hour work weeks would of any employee.
Oh, it's even worse than that. See that "DM this account with your CV" part? You currently need to pay for X Premium to send a DM to an account that does not follow you, meaning that you have to pay Elon for the privilege of applying to this job.
On the point of Japanese companies shedding staff .. There is a friendly, win-win way to move skilled staff out of your company, but my impression is it's not widely known nor often occur.
When a company finds that a particular staff member "isn't a good fit for the company" they will add this person to an informal list that is traded through back-channels with other companies. At some future time such personnel might be directly approached by headhunters on behalf of inquiring companies. Of course the current employer overlooks the poaching activity, they want the member gone. The only clue the office gets is one day out of the blue that member shows up to work wearing full interview attire, and might soon after announce that they are moving on.
For the managerial tier and above, they frequently socialize and will have a sense of when it is time to move on, in accordance with societal expectations. Given that the managerial profession comprises a relatively smaller group in Japan, they can expect to land their next gig soon enough.
As for the rest, I've heard of plenty of tactics used to induce (eventual) voluntary departure, "black" or otherwise. I don't advocate for them myself, but the culture, market, and law is what it is..
Yes cultural fitness reasons. Everything off the top of my head (drawing from experience) are exactly that. Two quick examples: Conflicts of character between them and their uppers along the report line. Being tossed aside for failure due to reasons out of their control.
But the staff member is still damn good at something, and is in need of a different venue to shine.
This shedding activity is referred to as the child's playing-card game "baba-nuki" (Old Maid). You are drawing a card from the other company's hand but don't know what card it is because they aren't showing you the face side. There is an emotional element to it (as with nearly everything else here) but also, maybe most importantly, Japanese society is quite fluid this way, it's one of the country's strengths. Everybody can understand if it is explained to them.
so - the implication is that they are good fits for these other companies? How does this work? How do you know that Bob is not a good fit for your company but a good fit for Apple? I would suppose then different metrics are used than just quality and quantity of work as that would imply being no good wherever you went?
You might be right that black companies do not exist and that the article is fantastical nonsense. But you seem to be making the argument it does not happen to me nor anyone I see therefore they do not exist. Isn't that not really a logical argument against their existence, but argument by personal incredulity? By definition, you would be unlikely to see or know these workers.
Black companies certainly still exist and still mistreat their employees—I know quite a few people that work a lot of overtime with no extra pay, experience パワハラ, are the longest tenured employee around after just one year because of the massive turnover... Just because some people (you, the other people you mention) don't experience this doesn't mean nobody else does.
That is my experience too. In my neighborhood, by 8pm, the streets are crawling with drunk salarymen (and women) stumbling out of izakayas on their way to a snack and/or karaoke -- 5 days per week. They clearly werent working overtime with how often I see them.
the nomikai is part of the work, where the social status is being reinforced (pouring drinks while deeply bowing to the boss, getting forced to drink, the speeches, the clapping, etc)
> I go home at 6pm everyday. go outside at 6pm and you will see businesspeople everywhere also on the commute home.
Just because you see something doesn't make it absolute truth. Try go home at 11PM and you will see plenty of salaryman in trains sleeping on each other.
The same could be said about going home at 6pm (except for the sleeping). Take the Oedo line out of Shinjuku or Roppongi between 6 and 8pm and tell me everyone is still at work.
As someone living in Japan (and working for a mostly reasonable Japanese-owned and operated company), I'm often a bit annoyed by the people confidently spouting second-hand Reddit knowledge that all Japanese workers are in situations like this (e.g. returning home from work at midnight, unable to quit, etc). If every company was a black company, they probably wouldn't have a word for it!
That said, it is far more common to work overtime here than in my home country and I'm puzzled by how many Japanese people I encounter who are like "Yeah working too much overtime is bad and people shouldn't have to do it. I don't like having to work overtime. Also I work multiple hours of overtime every day and have no plans to do anything to change that, it is what it is." When I inquire further, it doesn't seem like they CAN'T change jobs, more like inertia and passivity (and perhaps a sense that it's too hard/unlikely to find a significantly better situation). Going through the job search and interviewing process again is apparently a higher immediate mental barrier than the annoyance of working overtime every day.
I worked at a onsen for a month in 2004. I was an intern learning Japanese so they were easy on me, but the ladies working there were doing 6.30am to 9.30pm, every day (including weekends), no pause. The hotel owned the apartments they lived in, and everything in the town was run by onsens, so there was no "job market" really to play. I don't know how much they were paid, but it didn't seem like they were rolling in it. Many of them were complaining about their husbands not working, drinking etc., so I can only imagine that at 9.30pm, they would actually take care of everything in their homes as well. One day, one of them just collapsed, and she was given a day off.
Yet, the workers seemed to accept this as "business as usual" and were generally good-spirited. They were totally screwed over by management, cause the hotel was really expensive, and they knew they were being taken advantage of. But such is the effect of culture on people.
Anyways, all this to say that I think that pretty much every job in Japan would be seen as the darkest shade of black in the West. And I can't imagine how awful the conditions must be for the blacker companies in Japan.
Readit News
Interestingly, this is actually possible under Japanese law/legal precedent. If an employee, for example, decides to put in notice and then half-ass their job until their departure date, a company could actually sue the employee and win.
Other Japan-labor-law fun fact: if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date. Hope you like that job you signed onto!
Obligatory disclaimer: IANAL
Having seen the perverse incentives this creates and the various ways in which it can be abused, I have come to the conclusion that the American “at-will” employment model is actually a good thing and benefits workers. No one should discount the value of having the power to tell your employer to fuck off at a moment’s notice with no practical repercussions. No one should be required to stay in an abusive relationship a moment longer than they wish to.
I don’t know in which countries you worked but I didn’t have any problems getting out of a contract.
I think you are confusing "it is possible" with "it is common". Never heard of people in Japan get sued for quitting, even with shady English teaching centers. But definitely seen companies do them for scare tactics though.
Just an hypothesis.
I prefer the "chains on both sides" approach for the society.
Could you list any examples? Because I honestly don't see any way where potentially getting fired for no reason on the spot would be the beneficial option that you claim.
I've btw never heard of anyone where I live getting sued or unable to quit a job.
1. While it is technically true a company could sue a worker for quitting, the amount of damages they'd have to show is far beyond anything they'd be able to do outside of an upper management position. As far as I know, you could not sue someone for doing a half assed job.
2. I'm not even sure how you are using the word "illegal" here. AFAIK there is no provisions in criminal law for punishing people who break employment contracts. What I assume you are talking about is that a contract worker is bound by the terms of their contract as far as notice to quit goes, but there are a couple of limits to this. - This only applies in the first year of the contract. After the contract has been renewed once, standard Japanese labor law applies, which is two weeks of notice. - Similar to the above statement about suing someone for quitting, Japanese law only allows for suits to be for actual damages, so the company would have to prove significant damages to make the suit worth it. Contract workers are generally not high value employees so it would be unusual for one to be worth suing over.
A judge would automatically throw out the case if this was the argument for suing an employee. The reasoning being, if you continued to pay the employee during the term of their employment, and you knew that the employee was not performing based on some KPI or some yard stick, you would issue warning to the employee to improve their performance, or you would fire the employee on the spot. Continuing keep an underperforming employee is giving tactic consent that their work is reasonably acceptable because if it wasn't, you would start disciplinary action or cease their employment.
Threating a employee with coercive threats (such as threats of legal action) is going to land the business into hot water in any modern society.
Managing out a poor performer in Japan is a grinding process that can easily take two years from start to finish
> "Bandai Namco reportedly tries to bore staff into quitting, skirting Japan’s labor laws"
> Canceling some game projects and shuttering existing ones has helped, but facing the need for further adjustments, Bandai Namco has reportedly turned to the unspoken Japanese tradition of layoff-by-boredom by stuffing unwanted employees into oidashi beya, or "expulsion rooms."
> Do a quick online search for oidashi beya and you'll see plenty of websites explaining the practice, or otherwise discussing how difficult it is to fire people in Japan thanks to strong labor protections. It's not a new practice, either: For those that haven't been reading the Reg for the past 11 years, we even wrote about it way back in 2013 as a wave of the practice swept through Japan and hit tech workers at companies reportedly including Panasonic, Sony and other firms.
That sounds rather exaggerated. There may have been cases of an employee being sued for damages by their a employer for not performing their jobs well, but I've personally never heard of them and without digging deep into courts records, I doubt there are many of these.
The reason I highly doubt that, is that even just firing employees in Japan who are half-assing their job requires going to court and providing ample evidence that the employee has been continuously under-performing even though they were notified, given opportunity and failed to improve.
This standard is considered so high, that Japanese companies rarely fire employees for this type of reason (Ordinary termination 普通解雇 futsuu kaiko). When companies absolutely want to get rid of a certain employee, they often prefer to slowly make the employee's life miserable by giving them them demeaning tasks (or in some cases just no tasks at all!), bullying them and cutting their pay — a practice generally called iyagarase (roughly translated as "making someone feeling unpleasant"). That kind of play can also land the employer in legal trouble, but at least the burden of proof would fall on the employee. In many other cases still, companies just keep around employees that are under performing or convince them to take an voluntary retirement package.
In addition to all of that, employment contracts generally require a 30 day notice before quitting in Japan (I guess this is the maximum set by law). Combine that with the fact that most employees tend to have at least 14 days of unused leave accumulated, which they'd use just before leaving, they're not left with so enough working days in which they can half-ass their jobs.
I'm not quite sure about breaking your contract for contract employees, but it the original example ("I'll be threatened that I will have to pay damages for quitting") doesn't seem like a contract employee, and the term "black companies" and the discourse around usually refers to full-time employment. It's probably just threats, as the quote says. Managers sometimes say the craziest things to scare their companies out of quitting.
Suppose you are fired, and the company decides unilaterally to halve your salary during the notice period, wouldn't you get nasty about it?
> if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date
As long as it is illegal for the company to fire you as well, I don't see any problem. Why should a party of a contract be free to breach it at will while the other remains constrained?
Companies are run to make money, while people usually enter employment contracts in order to have money to feed their families and survive. Humans usually come to the consensus that people are more important than profits.
A company doesn't need to be doing anything illegal for the working conditions to be unsafe. I am still boycotting Paris Baguette and their sister companies because of their stubbornness and refusal to go beyond the legal minimums in safety equipment.
2 years ago a 23-year old employee got pulled into a sauce making machine and was crushed to death, with nobody finding her body until the next day. Let's say you are a bright 22-year old from the Philippines who got offered 3x your peers salary for working at an industrial bakery. It doesn't sound so bad right? Now let's say your friend got killed by machinery, and the company refuses to take responsibility because the safety equipment that could have prevented their death was optional and not legally required. You're 4 months into your 12-month contract. Do you have enough money to even get a flight back home? Do you have enough money to break your contract and pay the company for your flight from your home country, pay the company for breaking your subsidized lease in the dorms, etc? No you don't. That is a bad situation to be in. If it were me I would break the contract and just never come back to Korea. They're not going to extradite you for this debt, but does everyone know that? Especially migrant workers?
Now I know this is about Japan and not Korea. Look into how many Vietnamese go work in the textile industry in Japan and get injured. Should there really be more barriers and intimidation when it comes to forcing the workers to stay for the duration of their contract when their roommate was crippled by the machinery? Or should it be easier for people to leave potentially dangerous situations?
---
This also applies to white collar workers. Do you know how many Indian college students are lured to go work at a Japanese company with the promise of a high salary, only to then move to Tokyo and realize they're spending way more money than they expected due to the higher COL? Companies absolutely take advantage of this system. In the US companies usually only offer contracts to highly skilled workers, while in other countries companies offer contracts in order to trap individuals into poor working conditions and being underpaid when they're naive to the job market.
Deleted Comment
"Article 5: An employer must not force a worker to work against their will through the use of physical violence, intimidation, confinement, or any other means that unjustly restricts that worker's mental or physical freedom.
...
Article 16: An employer must not form a contract that prescribes a monetary penalty for breach of a labor contract or establishes the amount of compensation for loss or damage in advance."
(Source: https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3567)
This explicitly applies to contract workers (契約社員) too, and protections for employees (正社員) are so strong that it can often take months of documentation to dismiss someone. Whether people know they have these protections, knew they had them before they sign something their company gives them or feel comfortable actually reporting when a company has violated them is a different story. But basic salary is protected strongly enough that most Japanese companies heavily weight compensation on annual/semi-annual bonuses, housing allowances etc... (which are not protected).
It doesn't appear to be an exclusion of actual damages due to e.g. a one year contract worker quitting after 6 months, if it actually caused their employer damages.
It's difficult and costs money to prove that someone is half-assing their job on purpose, and that cost a company a specific dollar amount of losses. It's why they may threaten to sue, but rarely do.
> Other Japan-labor-law fun fact: if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date. Hope you like that job you signed onto!
It's technically a contract violation, but there are many exceptions that allow you to quit within the first year, and that's assuming the company is totally above board legally (hint: if it's a black company, then they aren't.)
Just like how Japan isn’t characterized fully by anime it’s not fully characterized by corporate culture either.
While damages are theoretically possible for leaving a fixed term employment contract early (with an exception after one year has passed), I'd be very interested in the precedent you're talking of, regarding an actual case of a contract employee being sued for quitting early.
Only case I found was the K's International case, 1992, where an employee quit after 4 days, and the employer sued and was awarded damages (amount unknown) due to the disruption it caused. I couldn't find any further details though.
The cops were there, trying to talk him down, but the fumes had reached such a concentration that the next time the aircon kicked in, the place exploded.
The worker exploitation in Japan is BAD, and has been for decades. When you employ someone, you don't technically own them, but culturally you absolutely do.
https://x.com/DOGE/status/1857076831104434289
("80+ hours per week" ... what kind of a psycho even writes this down and puts it out there as if it was normal in any way...)
If they ever decide "we will make it glamorous", be very afraid: Whatever destructive idiocy arises, the entertainment won't outweigh the harm.
> JPMorgan Chase & Co. will limit junior banker hours to 80 per week in most cases, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Exceptions may include extra work to complete live deals, the person said.
My favorite part if the analysis was by far
> If there is nothing particularly urgent for you to do, it’s fine for you to come in at 9 a.m. and leave at midnight Monday through Friday and work just one afternoon per weekend, but obviously if you’re on a deal you’ll need to do more.
https://archive.ph/2DI49
That's what their ideal compensation and workload be if their boss would have their way
It's an interesting read, but temporal context is important. The world has been through a lot. Even if we talk only about Japan, there has been
- COVID
- Tokyo 2020 Olympics
- 3 prime ministers leaving their posts
- Shinzo Abe getting shot
Assassinated, you mean.
When a company finds that a particular staff member "isn't a good fit for the company" they will add this person to an informal list that is traded through back-channels with other companies. At some future time such personnel might be directly approached by headhunters on behalf of inquiring companies. Of course the current employer overlooks the poaching activity, they want the member gone. The only clue the office gets is one day out of the blue that member shows up to work wearing full interview attire, and might soon after announce that they are moving on.
For the managerial tier and above, they frequently socialize and will have a sense of when it is time to move on, in accordance with societal expectations. Given that the managerial profession comprises a relatively smaller group in Japan, they can expect to land their next gig soon enough.
As for the rest, I've heard of plenty of tactics used to induce (eventual) voluntary departure, "black" or otherwise. I don't advocate for them myself, but the culture, market, and law is what it is..
Otherwise, why would a company headhunt an employee that is doing such a bad job that another company wants to fire them?
But the staff member is still damn good at something, and is in need of a different venue to shine.
This shedding activity is referred to as the child's playing-card game "baba-nuki" (Old Maid). You are drawing a card from the other company's hand but don't know what card it is because they aren't showing you the face side. There is an emotional element to it (as with nearly everything else here) but also, maybe most importantly, Japanese society is quite fluid this way, it's one of the country's strengths. Everybody can understand if it is explained to them.
also it is nearly impossible to fire anyone in Japan for anything
Just because you see something doesn't make it absolute truth. Try go home at 11PM and you will see plenty of salaryman in trains sleeping on each other.
That said, it is far more common to work overtime here than in my home country and I'm puzzled by how many Japanese people I encounter who are like "Yeah working too much overtime is bad and people shouldn't have to do it. I don't like having to work overtime. Also I work multiple hours of overtime every day and have no plans to do anything to change that, it is what it is." When I inquire further, it doesn't seem like they CAN'T change jobs, more like inertia and passivity (and perhaps a sense that it's too hard/unlikely to find a significantly better situation). Going through the job search and interviewing process again is apparently a higher immediate mental barrier than the annoyance of working overtime every day.
Yet, the workers seemed to accept this as "business as usual" and were generally good-spirited. They were totally screwed over by management, cause the hotel was really expensive, and they knew they were being taken advantage of. But such is the effect of culture on people.
Anyways, all this to say that I think that pretty much every job in Japan would be seen as the darkest shade of black in the West. And I can't imagine how awful the conditions must be for the blacker companies in Japan.