How Japanese black companies oppress workers (2014)

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

Just like how Japan isn’t characterized fully by anime it’s not fully characterized by corporate culture either.

Managing out a poor performer in Japan is a grinding process that can easily take two years from start to finish

If you're really good, as I'd hope the people on here are, you can get into a foreign company and get paid… more than the average native.

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.

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.

I don’t know in which countries you worked but I didn’t have any problems getting out of a contract.

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.)

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.

While getting terminated is disruptive, it isn’t the end of the world for the typical American. The relative ease with which most people can get another job is also nice. It is an economy that is structured under the assumption that people will move between jobs and minimizes the friction in doing so.

I have seen the “having a contract” thing abused many times in many countries in Europe. Thanks, but no thanks. I have had that contract multiple times and I don’t want that contract. That safety blanket comes with heavy chains. I’ve seen those contracts used to stifle far too many employees to condone it, employees deserve better.

In a stable environment, in a large organization, it doesn’t really make sense to fire people in the hopes of getting someone better. You are more likely to get someone worse, or more expensive, or who has a long ramp up period. It’s possible that the manager trying to exit an employee is exercising subjective/uncalibrated performance guidelines- or is covering their own incompetence.

I'm in the process of buying a house here. I have helped other with the process, too.

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.

"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).

I think if a bunch of people just go into town and do it together it will be less isolating.

Just an hypothesis.

I prefer the "chains on both sides" approach for the society.

We're talking about an employee on a fixed term contract, so there's not really any scope for disciplinary action of the "performance improvement plan" type. And the argument would be that they were hired because of a time-sensitive job (hence the need for this kind of irregular employee) and so just not paying them for work doesn't make the company whole, they needed someone to do that work at that specific point in time and if not then they have damages that are much larger than the salary they would've paid.

Of course by the time you get to court you can poke several holes in this argument. But under Japanese law it's a valid argument on its face, so it's something the employer can use to threaten.

At every point in time, finding a job wasn’t an issue. It might have not been a great job, but it was a job that paid the bills until a better job came along. Being able to bootstrap to a better job is something the US does really well.

I believe it’s the case that in some places, bureaucrats can basically just say “no” if you decide to lay people off. Why would you want to hire people in the first place if there were a risk of that happening, especially if you have the option to hire people in a different country?

1. The construction quality of the average Japanese house is absolute garbage. Most likely you will need to demolish it and rebuild from scratch.

2. Outside of the big cities, Japan sucks hard. The average small city or village is just a bunch of big box stores and houses scattered everywhere. Many Japanese people want to move to the big cities just to enjoy proper services and some excitement in their lives. So if you move here I hope that you enjoy staying alone at home, because there is not much else to do.

The origin of the practice was in WW2, when Roosevelt froze wages. To attract more and better employees, the companies threw in health insurance as a way around the restrictions.

The "inexplicably" being a commentary on the wisdom/sanity/compassion of linking healthcare to employment, rather than a claim that the parent comment had made an inexplicable leap of logic

If you have three months notice period in your contract, your employer could sue for loss of income if you don't honour that notice period.

It usually doesn't happen that way, because it is a waste of everyone's time and money. But, if some employer feels the need to set an example the option is there.

Its not very likely and hard to prove damages by the employer, but possible.

Nothing really stopping you from simply half-assing your job during your notice period, though.

As an aging guy, I'm also staring down the barrel of cross-party consensus on replicating the predatory US healthcare model in my country. I see what things look like in the States, and no thanks.

> While getting terminated is disruptive, it isn’t the end of the world for the typical American.

Whenever conversations like this come up, I feel the need to remind folks that most folks don't work in tech for colossal salaries. Around a quarter of Americans have less than USD 1,000 saved, most under 5,000.[0] No runway is the norm, I'd put that well above "disruptive" for "most Americans".

[^0] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/savings/average-ameri...

-Huge staff rotation (a lot of it people getting fired).

-There being little consequences if a role isn't filled.

Regarding that second point: what happens if there's one cashier, delivery driver or store stocker fewer? Not much, except for delays, unless they're the very last one.

COBRA costs you exactly how much you + your employer were paying for that insurance.

It's expensive because your employer's share of insurance was a significant part of your compensation (And because US healthcare costs are pants-on-head insane.) I'll point out that it's generally quite expensive to, like, stop getting paid.

Practically, post-ACA, health insurance in the US is about as tied to employment as having a roof over your head and food on your table is. If you don't have employment, or money, you're going to be in trouble - but that's the case with everything you need to live, not just healthcare.

The more common way to do this these days is to feign an illness like stress and get signed off work, paid, by the doctor, then quit later.

In many countries that kind of lawsuit would be trivially dismissed, because an employee not working does not give an employer a cause of action. In Japan a company can at least in theory be owed damages if an employee on a fixed-term employment contract of less than a year fails to work, so a case like that would go to trial on the merits (even if everyone knows it's very difficult for the company to actually meet the bar for showing damages) and be significantly more costly to defend, and that fact creates a chilling effect.

> How-ever coercive threats of legal action is also in of itself constitute a encroachment of someone free will and statutory right which everything being equal could be ground for further legal recourse by the other party.

Under what law?

No way ..... $200,000 more a year comp.

Hell yeah ..... gym membership

The purpose of our lives is not productivity. (I have no idea what it might be, but that’s a different thread)

Look, I lead very comfortable life compared to most. Many of the people here are like me, and I dare say, you. But we’re a blip in history. And most of that history hasn’t been particularly kind to people who weren’t born to wealth. I wish more folks internalised that lesson.

In the EU, if I sign a 1-year contract there is an expectation that I will actually work that year. If I break contract by deciding to get another job without negotiating early exit with my employer, I could be on the hook for damages. This doesn't come up very often because in the EU people just don't break contracts like this--if you want to hire someone you ask when their contract is up and work around that. But the reason why people behave this way is because the termination of a contract is a serious deal and hard to navigate.

The US is (mostly) at-will employment. One aspect of that everyone talks about is that the company can fire you at any time for almost any reason. That sucks. The flip side though is that you can fire your employer any time you like, and walk of the job to somewhere that pays you better or treats you better. This is at the root of a lot of American dynamism, and a good thing.

At-will employment is definitely something that cuts both ways.

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.

If you have ever employed people (I have), it'd be clear that isn't true. You have no actual power over them. You cannot make them come to work. You cannot make them do anything at all. They can get up and leave at any moment, and you can do nothing.

You know who can do that? The military. If you don't follow orders, into the brig you go. They can even execute you.

> The purpose of our lives is not productivity.

Productivity gives us the amazing high standard of living we enjoy today.

> most of that history hasn’t been particularly kind to people who weren’t born to wealth

Freedom produced prosperity which changed all that for the better. Freedom is the greatest human invention ever.

An employer is not the parent of the employees. It's a transaction - trading labor for money. Just like you buying donuts at the store. If you buy donuts from them daily, should you be forced to continue buying donuts from them? Of course not.

Have you ever hired a service to mow your lawn? When you're unhappy with them, do you cease the relationship? Or do you now owe them your continuing business?

> > I have come to the conclusion that the American “at-will” employment model is actually a good thing and benefits workers

It may seem like you can just walk away from a job but realistically most people can't.

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?

Stop linking medical insurance to employment via this tax bigotry. Buy it on the open market instead, or subsidize it if you're a leftist, but don't put that burden on jobs, you'll only get fewer jobs with greater hassle. People can agree to the arrangements they prefer, and it's not for us to second guess that. If there are people who end up coming up short, then you can help them yourself, or force the whole society to chip in (again, if you're a leftist), but don't force such considerations on the fragile links among private individuals and businesses.

> "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.

A lot of immigrants leave their home countries not because they love the culture of their new country, but because they found living in their old country unbearable for some reason. Or just for economic reasons.

Not everyone actually wants to integrate into a new culture; many don't. Just look at how many people in the US don't speak English, even though that's obviously the dominant culture.

This sounds much like rural America. Houses scattered everywhere, and a super Walmart.

The big difference I've noticed here in Japan (I live in Tokyo), at least from my window on the train going through rural areas, is that the houses tend to be clustered together much more closely. In rural America, everyone wants many acres of land to themselves, but in rural Japan, the land is usually used for farming and the houses are quite close together in a hamlet.

It goes both ways: during that time, the employee too can quit with a reduced mandatory notice.

That only covers the "if that person ends up sucking" part though.

For the other "business falling apart", maybe they consider it’s part of the business owner’s responsibility to make sound business decisions when involving someone else’s livelihood. Just like when leasing a shop or taking on a loan.

What about running a tech startup with high chance of failure? Ever considered why they seem to be few and far between in EU?

From a practical perspective, how does that work? I understand if you’re making widgets on the assembly line, you’re gonna keep coming in. But if you’re doing creative work or close work with customers, isn’t there a concern that you’re effort will definitely flag and you’re gonna do crappy work?

I've been struggling to even get an interview in junior software dev for over a year now. Tried some help desk as well and never heard back. I've had my resume looked at quite a few times now, so I doubt that that's the problem.

If you go to r/jobs and related subreddits, there are plenty of people who are losing their minds after applying to thousands of jobs for the last 2 years without even getting a prescreen. Some are even being rejected by temp agencies. I assume that this is an anomaly and 2023-24 had a uniquely terrible job market.

I'm going to a job fair soon. Wish me luck.

Paid by the doctor? I think sick pay comes from the employer initially and later statutory sick pay(state).

Then of course, being unemployed, you have the option of COBRA (you probably don't want that though), and if it does not make you immediately eligible for Medicaid in your state (40 of 50 have Medicaid expansion), it would make you eligible for the ACA subsidized plans. NB: more than one-third of employer-sponsored plans are HDHPs, meaning employees have deductibles in the thousands of dollars anyway.

It's certainly a disruption, and it's one more thing to consider, but the idea that "most Americans" are one job loss away from being killed by lack of health care is not remotely true - most people don't need health care that regularly, unemployed people have insurance options, and at a last resort, for the most part, you can accrue unlimited medical debt in most places with few real-world consequences.

That and other reasons (few vacantion days, request to overtime, etc) is why one should avoid American companies in Europe, if possible.

Trust goes both ways.

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?

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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.

A 1-year employment contract in the EU will still have a notice period, probably 2-4 weeks. (Probably 1 month for a 2-year contract.)

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.

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.

If you want to be free to leave, just accept that the company is free to let you go. That's all!

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.

It costs loads more to be poor than to have some money. You won't save money by buying up-front, if your credit is low you'll pay more than a person with more money, you miss payments and the late fees rack up, you overdraft and your fees add up, you can't go on autopay to save money because you risk going into overdraft, etc.

Maybe if the 1% didn't own 50% off all the resources (money) than poor people could find some money to save.

It would be very easy to reverse, if literally anyone was willing to.

(The system might work if some lag was introduced (a year of keeping that level of insurance??), but I'm not sure that this duration would not quickly get sapped by perverse incentives ?)

For most women of child bearing age, between birth control and annual visits, healthcare is pretty important.

Most people make an extra effort to end on a positive note, both with colleagues and managers. Of course, effectively off-boarding yourself means having progressively less and less to do as time goes by... So in that sense you sort of quiet quit.

Changing the tax deduction status would harm businesses, and therefore I can't see a conservative administration ever letting that fly.

This question isn’t relevant to the claim that I am responding to.

> Losing the income is a consequence, but it's the same consequence in both cases and so is not part of the conversation

You’re right that having no income is the same as having no income, and the manner in which it was lost does not matter. But the state of “having no income” does indeed matter. That statement is relevant to this conversation due to gp’s claim that losing income and health insurance are not “practical repercussions” of losing employment. That’s a naïveté that a stable society cannot abide.

For now.

> The relative ease with which most people can get another job is also nice.

This seems unemphathetic. Even just for the tech industry, thousands of engineers have found it difficult to find new work after the layoffs of the previous years. Please do not extrapolate your experience of the ease of finding new work towards every other American.

> It is an economy that is structured under the assumption that people will move between jobs and minimizes the friction in doing so.

No. Even if you look at it from a process perspective, true minimized friction is when other countries goverments automatically deduct and manage your taxes when you move jobs, manage retirement funds and have socialized healthcare to reduce the stress and uncertainty during unemployment. You claim that "at-will" minimizes friction is a joke compared to those.

Annual visits are also not actually that important. They’re perfunctory. They can certainly be put off for a few months in a ok except a few one in a million cases.

And at any rate, as I said, losing your job in the US means your insurance is disrupted, not that you are now uninsured. Pregnancy even in states without Medicaid expansion will get the mother and child on Medicaid.

Of course, at the risk of being silly, it’s also true that missing a day of birth control is not what got your wife pregnant. ;) it’s pretty surprising to me how many people (now with children) thought birth control meant they wouldn’t get pregnant. There definitely needs to be better education on this. Taking birth control, even regularly, even with an IUD, is more like a backstop and should not be relied on for your primary protection. The odds are low but when you play them a few times a week for ten years…

In my experience, your perception depends heavily on your personal background. The city where I live (Misawa) hosts an American military base, and when talking with them nobody ever complaints about the urban sprawl, I guess it is normal for them.

However, I am from Spain, a country where even small villages are very compact (we prefer to build all the houses together, and keep the farms outside), so for me Japanese villages feel very sparse. Another big difference is that in Spain we value public areas (the third space), and here public spaces range between infrequent and not-existent.

I had a long gap between employers where I lived off of saved money and explored new tech with a hope that I'd be able to improve my standing in the market. It made it nearly impossible to get anyone interested in my application because the gap was years.

Once I'd finally changed that by working a temp gig (having now achieved recent employment), I started getting calls. The job I took required visiting clients on-site from time to time. They didn't think to ask me if I had a car or license. When they found out (as I took a company-paid Uber 25m in my second month), I sensed that they realized they'd left a huge gap in their interview process. I was reassigned to only visit clients that I could get to via a combination of train and ride-share or short ride-share.

Had they asked about long-distance on-sites and my ability to get there myself, I'm confident I wouldn't have been hired.

There's no reason why a law cannot be passed amending the tax code to make health insurance premiums paid by an individual tax deductible.

I'm not saying it would be easy to get such a law passed, but that doesn't change the fact that it's stupid to have health insurance tied to your employer.

(At any rate, health insurance premiums are tax deductible, but the rules are annoying and require that your healthcare spending be a certain percentage of your income.)

Again to be clear I'm talking about contract employees 契約社員 who fall under the scope of the Labor Standards act - freelancers who agree to pay a penalty if they breach contract I'm not sure on how enforceable that would be.