> "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.
The reason is explicable - health insurance paid by the employer is tax-deductible, while insurance paid by the employee is not. Therefore, employers include it as a way to increase total compensation at a lower cost.
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.
Thanks for reminding us that state intervention is the source of the problem.
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.
I can spell it out, if it helps. In a country with exorbitant healthcare costs, it means that leaving your job means that you (and often your family) don't get healthcare.
I'm thinking you misinterpreted the comment you responded to? I read it as saying that you don't necessarily have to have employment linked healthcare just because you have at-will employment.
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
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.
Our regulations (including the medical guild) and legal structure (including crazy malpractice payouts for unintentional mistakes) forces everything to be more expensive than necessary. We are very far from a free market, even if we stopped with the untaxed benefits.
US healthcare is a market but not for patients. Insurance, employers and hospitals negotiate a lot. But people who get employer based insurance just have to accept what they are given. Pretty crazy.
It is, though, because it kind of transfers most of the power in the relationship to the employer. Without it, I imagine they'd find some other way, or lobby the state away from at-will employment.
America has very low unemployment and median household incomes are among the highest in the world. You get to continue your existing health insurance 18 months after you quit if you wish, you just have to pay for it. Most people can and if you can’t then the government pays for it.
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.
The flipside is that you have no job security. In Europe, we've been moving towards more American style "flexible employment" for years, and it's highly controversial.
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".
They don't save because they don't need to since there's always a job available as hiring is so easy. In Europe we need to save in case we want to quit, since then we lose all rights and protections and need to wait months before finding a new job.
A major reason poor people don't save is the inflationary currency and government control of interest rates (plus other central bank policy) encourages debt over saving. We slowly put a noose around our necks because our laws put lights on that runway. We need major reform to get back to a saving mindset. It'll be a world where the government will borrow and print far less money.
While your comment may shed some light on the nuances, gp’s point shouldn’t be disregarded. Losing income and health insurance is in fact amongst the most practical of repercussions one can experience upon losing a job.
That this needs to be spelled out just shows that HN operates in an extremely privileged bubble.
Some people are aware of it, but most don’t seem to be.
The other part is that companies are much more willing to hire people if they know they can get rid of them if either that person ends up sucking or business starts to fall off.
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?
In most of them there is an initial probationary trial period during which you can easily fire someone without providing any justification, and with a minimal mandatory notice.
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.
> 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?
>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.
FWIW, I don’t have any experience in Japan, I have no idea what the nuances are like there. I have a lot of experience in Europe, which echoed some of the themes raised.
Do you have examples ? I have never heard European people being sued for quitting either. The opposite of at-will employment is not that you can't quit. Just that employers can't suddenly fire you without repercussions.
The termination period in a Swedish employment contract certainly applies in both directions.
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.
In the UK, an employee can't legally walk off the job without notice but it does happen albeit rarely. Nobody ever sues them. The only reason people don't do it more often is so they have a reference for their next employment.
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 Finland I believe you need very vindictive company. And even then any amount of money you can get out of it likely is not worth the work hours spend.
It is my understanding that you haven’t quit until your notice period is over, you just have given notice. As such it is not surprising to me that you still have to do the job or face some consequences; you signed a contract after all. You would sue your employer too if they fired you and then immediately stopped paying you.
Depends, in Eastern Europe "suing" does not happen often, in fact, it is quite rare, for both employers and employees. I see how people in the US are threatening to sue all the time, but that is not the case around here. It would take too much time and money and usually is not worth it.
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.
Sounds like a perfect deal for both employers and gyms - when talking about compensation, it feels like good extra value; when it comes to actually go to the gym, it feels like someone else's money, so no big deal if you skip this time, right?
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.
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.
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!
I knew about such periods from reading the handbook when I was working for a global company where US was 3-4 weeks depending on title and other locations were ~3 months.
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?
Not at all, the labour market takes that into account, to the extent that if you're available to start working tomorrow, everyone is jostled off balance and chances are you will be asked to begin in three months, anyway.
I don’t think I’ve ever talked with a recruiter who didn’t ask what my notice period was in the opening conversation. IT services sector has a standard notice period too, so I think most employers expect 2-4 weeks anyways for most people they’d hire.
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.
Some of my dearest friends are on the lower end of working class and don’t make a lot of money. They worry about many things but finding another job is not among them. We talk about it. I am financially well off now but I’ve also lived decades of abject poverty, I am not unfamiliar with what that entails.
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.
That's a general feature of minimum-wage jobs, not just in the US. The reason is twofold:
-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.
It's a false dichotomy anyway. There's no law of nature that says an employee being able to quit at a moment's notice means the company should be allowed to, for example, fire someone with no cause on the spot.
Asymmetrical relationships are baked into employment. Indeed, that’s the very basis of the idea. Labour laws, unions etc came into existence to change that balance of power. Without them, no paid holiday, no proper weekend, no pension. All of these things reduce productivity.
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.
> Asymmetrical relationships are baked into employment.
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?
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.
> 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.
Employee protection laws have nothing to do with what I was talking about. As an employee in the USA (contract or freelance), I can quit any time I like. My contract may be for two years, but I can cancel it tomorrow if I want, and only in extreme cases is there any penalty for doing so.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Each party has their own valid argument that is why they're seeking the court to make a ruling. 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. You could also go into nit picking details around consent and duress during employment, which can get complicated really quickly.
> Each party has their own valid argument that is why they're seeking the court to make a ruling.
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.
> 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?
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).
I suspect these processes are also there to prevent “rocking the boat”. There are a number of US F500 companies that are effectively static businesses with predictable market dynamics.
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 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).
> 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.
Do you actually know many people (not through social media) that did this? I live here, and I know a few but they mostly fall into one of two camps. 1) Moving into and maintaining the house/land/community relationships is a labor of love, which involves a lot of work or 2) They don't last long once they realize the physical labor, the mental load of the language/culture/isolation.
I'm in the process of buying a house here. I have helped other with the process, too.
I don't think building an island is the answer. It will make it even difficult to integrate into the culture. And if you don't want to integrate into the culture, why are you there in the first place?
>And if you don't want to integrate into the culture, why are you there in the first place?
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.
The pay is low, but the cost of living is also surprisingly low. It doesn’t take much to get by, so long as you’re not living in the most desirable areas in Tokyo.
I actually live in the Japanese countryside, so let me tell you that there are two reasons why those houses are so cheap:
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 average small city or village is just a bunch of big box stores and houses scattered everywhere.
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.
Yeah, I think brown people are less welcome, although I still want to spend a month just wandering around record shops listening to Japanese jazz-funk and slurping noodles
It's also a lot nicer living here, in my experience, than in America in the last 8 years. Sure, there's some bad companies, but that's true everywhere.
Oh, I still love it, just not in a rose-tinted goggles way, like I did when I was 18. I did work a few stints at a Japanese company in London and saw the slight clash of corporate cultures up close.
A good season, with the front runners doing something really special at times. Conflicted fan of the sprints and so many races due to the pressure to squeeze money from the sport, but enjoying the extra racing.
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.
Ah yes, the good old family/friends angle. And it's true... well, kind of. What they don't tell you is that what they expect from YOU is that you'll behave like TheBiz is your second family (loyalty, sacrifice, forgiveness...), but of course for TheBiz you'll still be just an easily replaceable cog in the machine... anything more would be WEIRD, right?
Off the charts levels cringe.
Just be professional and treat employment like any other business transaction. Why is it so hard for founders and HRs to not be full of shit and treat their employees with dignity and respect?
Like, come on, TheBiz and I are not family, we're not friends and we will never be anything of the sort. We have a somewhat common goal (of making money), but that's about it. It's a giant red flag to (pretend to) expect anything 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.
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?
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)
Im not disputing the fact that nomikai exists. Ive been to my share. I was simply agreeing with the OP that it is more likely that most Japanese people arent working insane amounts of overtime and black companies arent in the majority. I provided a personal anecdote to reinforce that.
Most people are more than likely getting off at regular hours and going home or out for dinner and drinks (whether you consider that work or not -- they arent being paid). Otherwise the bars and trains wouldnt be packed full of people at 6pm and happy hour wouldnt exist.
Not sure why youre being a contrarian. It seems like you didnt bother to understand my post. But yah, start work at 8-9, knock off at 6 to start drinking heavily at the local izakaya, hammered by 8 or 9 and stumbling towards the snack until last train (or later if the company pays for cabs).
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.
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.
> 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.
"Not everyone works at black companies" and "nobody works at black companies" are very different statements. People going home at 6 is evidence for the former, not the latter.
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.
Now do "How American companies oppress workers and run lives". We got wage theft, abuse, sexual harassment, at will firings, wage slavery, and all sorts of fucked up healthcare forcing people to work here. Edit: to say nothing of our prison slave labor here.
There are multiple companies in Japan that specialize in quitting people’s jobs by proxy. I assume it helps because you can’t illegally threaten a person through a witness.
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.
Why don't they just emigrate? Work culture seems to be better just about everywhere and on top of that, salaries in Japan are shit, and anyone with half the Japanese work ethics will be a dream employee in U.S. or let alone Europe which is full of entitled, lazy slackers.
At least in IT, it's not even necessary to emigrate- foreign owned companies offer significantly better salaries and working conditions.
The sticking point is English ability. It's genuinely a very difficult thing to learn a second language to the point of being workplace-functional in it, and an additional level of daily stress and mental effort to do everything in your non-native language. The culture here doesn't exactly reward risk-taking and failing in public, and unfortunately becoming proficient in a language requires that you stumble through things a lot while you practice. Furthermore, most Japanese people have experienced fairly ineffective methods of teaching English in schools and ended up rather demoralized about their ability to learn it. (And if you're currently in a job that demands a lot of overtime, when do you study?)
But isn't it kinda mandatory for any IT person to speak usable English, worldwide? Even if super closed societies where language education sucks beyond imagination, like Russia, they mostly do.
> "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!
Obligatory disclaimer: IANAL
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.
I wouldn’t call losing your source of income and maybe your health insurance no practical repercussions.
I don’t know in which countries you worked but I didn’t have any problems getting out of a contract.
Inexplicably linking employment with healthcare seems unrelated to at-will employment.
The reason is explicable - health insurance paid by the employer is tax-deductible, while insurance paid by the employee is not. Therefore, employers include it as a way to increase total compensation at a lower cost.
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.
Thanks for reminding us that state intervention is the source of the problem.
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.
I can spell it out, if it helps. In a country with exorbitant healthcare costs, it means that leaving your job means that you (and often your family) don't get healthcare.
I'm thinking you misinterpreted the comment you responded to? I read it as saying that you don't necessarily have to have employment linked healthcare just because you have at-will employment.
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
But the discussion wasn't about "generic at-will" employment. It started as "American at-will" employment.
> > 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.
I very much read it as I responded, and re-reading, still interpret it as such.
COBRA?
That’s super expensive. ACA is often better but that may change now with the republicans having control of congress.
> That’s super expensive
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.
Our regulations (including the medical guild) and legal structure (including crazy malpractice payouts for unintentional mistakes) forces everything to be more expensive than necessary. We are very far from a free market, even if we stopped with the untaxed benefits.
US healthcare is a market but not for patients. Insurance, employers and hospitals negotiate a lot. But people who get employer based insurance just have to accept what they are given. Pretty crazy.
It is, though, because it kind of transfers most of the power in the relationship to the employer. Without it, I imagine they'd find some other way, or lobby the state away from at-will employment.
America has very low unemployment and median household incomes are among the highest in the world. You get to continue your existing health insurance 18 months after you quit if you wish, you just have to pay for it. Most people can and if you can’t then the government pays for it.
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.
The flipside is that you have no job security. In Europe, we've been moving towards more American style "flexible employment" for years, and it's highly controversial.
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...
They don't save because they don't need to since there's always a job available as hiring is so easy. In Europe we need to save in case we want to quit, since then we lose all rights and protections and need to wait months before finding a new job.
A major reason poor people don't save is the inflationary currency and government control of interest rates (plus other central bank policy) encourages debt over saving. We slowly put a noose around our necks because our laws put lights on that runway. We need major reform to get back to a saving mindset. It'll be a world where the government will borrow and print far less money.
While your comment may shed some light on the nuances, gp’s point shouldn’t be disregarded. Losing income and health insurance is in fact amongst the most practical of repercussions one can experience upon losing a job.
That this needs to be spelled out just shows that HN operates in an extremely privileged bubble. Some people are aware of it, but most don’t seem to be.
The other part is that companies are much more willing to hire people if they know they can get rid of them if either that person ends up sucking or business starts to fall off.
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?
In most of them there is an initial probationary trial period during which you can easily fire someone without providing any justification, and with a minimal mandatory notice.
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.
> 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?
France is especially like that, with consequent mass unemployment. That's the model the progressive side of our politics wants to emulate.
>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.
FWIW, I don’t have any experience in Japan, I have no idea what the nuances are like there. I have a lot of experience in Europe, which echoed some of the themes raised.
Do you have examples ? I have never heard European people being sued for quitting either. The opposite of at-will employment is not that you can't quit. Just that employers can't suddenly fire you without repercussions.
The termination period in a Swedish employment contract certainly applies in both directions.
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.
That is certainly supprising to me. I assume most people just deal with it by showing up but silent quitting ?
In the UK, an employee can't legally walk off the job without notice but it does happen albeit rarely. Nobody ever sues them. The only reason people don't do it more often is so they have a reference for their next employment.
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 Finland I believe you need very vindictive company. And even then any amount of money you can get out of it likely is not worth the work hours spend.
It is possible to be sued for damages in Germany if you quit and don't come back to work during your notice period.
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.
It is my understanding that you haven’t quit until your notice period is over, you just have given notice. As such it is not surprising to me that you still have to do the job or face some consequences; you signed a contract after all. You would sue your employer too if they fired you and then immediately stopped paying you.
Depends, in Eastern Europe "suing" does not happen often, in fact, it is quite rare, for both employers and employees. I see how people in the US are threatening to sue all the time, but that is not the case around here. It would take too much time and money and usually is not worth it.
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.
Drake meme:
No way ..... $200,000 more a year comp.
Hell yeah ..... gym membership
Sounds like a perfect deal for both employers and gyms - when talking about compensation, it feels like good extra value; when it comes to actually go to the gym, it feels like someone else's money, so no big deal if you skip this time, right?
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.
Deregulate medicine and include benefits as income (and lower income tax rates to prevent revenue windfall).
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.
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!
I knew about such periods from reading the handbook when I was working for a global company where US was 3-4 weeks depending on title and other locations were ~3 months.
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?
Not at all, the labour market takes that into account, to the extent that if you're available to start working tomorrow, everyone is jostled off balance and chances are you will be asked to begin in three months, anyway.
It does not. New jobs know about notice periods and plan ahead.
My wife’s experience was that having a three month notice period to change jobs was a dealbreaker. She’s not a software engineer.
I don’t think I’ve ever talked with a recruiter who didn’t ask what my notice period was in the opening conversation. IT services sector has a standard notice period too, so I think most employers expect 2-4 weeks anyways for most people they’d hire.
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.
Some of my dearest friends are on the lower end of working class and don’t make a lot of money. They worry about many things but finding another job is not among them. We talk about it. I am financially well off now but I’ve also lived decades of abject poverty, I am not unfamiliar with what that entails.
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.
That's a general feature of minimum-wage jobs, not just in the US. The reason is twofold:
-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.
It's a false dichotomy anyway. There's no law of nature that says an employee being able to quit at a moment's notice means the company should be allowed to, for example, fire someone with no cause on the spot.
The asymmetry is an artificial distortion of the market, and like all such distortions, reduces overall productivity.
Asymmetrical relationships are baked into employment. Indeed, that’s the very basis of the idea. Labour laws, unions etc came into existence to change that balance of power. Without them, no paid holiday, no proper weekend, no pension. All of these things reduce productivity.
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.
> Asymmetrical relationships are baked into employment.
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?
At-will coupled with layoff disclosure laws seems pretty solid. The result seems to be that severance pay is a lot more common.
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.
> 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.
Yeah it is definitely an America-centric take. Most of Europe also has strong contract laws. “At-will employment” cuts both ways.
Most of them have strong employee protection laws too which prevent such an abuse
That’s what the phrase “cuts both ways” means.
They're saying that it cuts one way.
Employee protection laws have nothing to do with what I was talking about. As an employee in the USA (contract or freelance), I can quit any time I like. My contract may be for two years, but I can cancel it tomorrow if I want, and only in extreme cases is there any penalty for doing so.
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.
Neither of these things is completely true.
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 half assed job
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.
> 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.
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.
Each party has their own valid argument that is why they're seeking the court to make a ruling. 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. You could also go into nit picking details around consent and duress during employment, which can get complicated really quickly.
> Each party has their own valid argument that is why they're seeking the court to make a ruling.
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?
> 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?
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
That explains this: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/bandai_namcos_layoff_...
> "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).
I suspect these processes are also there to prevent “rocking the boat”. There are a number of US F500 companies that are effectively static businesses with predictable market dynamics.
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 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."
(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).
> 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.
Do you actually know many people (not through social media) that did this? I live here, and I know a few but they mostly fall into one of two camps. 1) Moving into and maintaining the house/land/community relationships is a labor of love, which involves a lot of work or 2) They don't last long once they realize the physical labor, the mental load of the language/culture/isolation.
I'm in the process of buying a house here. I have helped other with the process, too.
I Airbnbed in the place of one guy who did it. And I know one more. The rest are on social media like you said.
I think if a bunch of people just go into town and do it together it will be less isolating.
I don't think building an island is the answer. It will make it even difficult to integrate into the culture. And if you don't want to integrate into the culture, why are you there in the first place?
>And if you don't want to integrate into the culture, why are you there in the first place?
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.
The main issue for foreigners is that the pay is low. The culture can be bad (especially around tech) but it's not that bad.
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.
The pay is low, but the cost of living is also surprisingly low. It doesn’t take much to get by, so long as you’re not living in the most desirable areas in Tokyo.
I actually live in the Japanese countryside, so let me tell you that there are two reasons why those houses are so cheap:
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 average small city or village is just a bunch of big box stores and houses scattered everywhere.
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.
Yeah, I think brown people are less welcome, although I still want to spend a month just wandering around record shops listening to Japanese jazz-funk and slurping noodles
i wouldn't go that far, it's still a very fun language and a rich culture.
It's also a lot nicer living here, in my experience, than in America in the last 8 years. Sure, there's some bad companies, but that's true everywhere.
What has changed in America the last 8 years?
Oh, I still love it, just not in a rose-tinted goggles way, like I did when I was 18. I did work a few stints at a Japanese company in London and saw the slight clash of corporate cultures up close.
Totally unrelated… I’m really excited to see VR46 as a username, especially since the championship was today
A good season, with the front runners doing something really special at times. Conflicted fan of the sprints and so many races due to the pressure to squeeze money from the sport, but enjoying the extra racing.
For those not from the Usenet days, IANAL: I'm not a lawyer.
I think it's still a widely used acronym.
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.
Funny seeing a post about these as that's what I was recently reminded of when reading this post:
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...)
Reads like a job ad for the worst startup in the world:
Work hard, play hard, we are like a family — uttered by several YC companies at various recruiting events
To my ears, there is nothing more cringe than “work hard, play hard”
Ah yes, the good old family/friends angle. And it's true... well, kind of. What they don't tell you is that what they expect from YOU is that you'll behave like TheBiz is your second family (loyalty, sacrifice, forgiveness...), but of course for TheBiz you'll still be just an easily replaceable cog in the machine... anything more would be WEIRD, right?
Off the charts levels cringe.
Just be professional and treat employment like any other business transaction. Why is it so hard for founders and HRs to not be full of shit and treat their employees with dignity and respect?
Like, come on, TheBiz and I are not family, we're not friends and we will never be anything of the sort. We have a somewhat common goal (of making money), but that's about it. It's a giant red flag to (pretend to) expect anything more.
> unglamorous cost-cutting
If they ever decide "we will make it glamorous", be very afraid: Whatever destructive idiocy arises, the entertainment won't outweigh the harm.
That's slavery. Except we call it nowadays: "over performance, over working, over time ... and a free coffee in our office as a reward"
I did not realise that this is the new Department Of Government Efficiency’s twitter account. What a wild reality.
This is what every employee of Musk's companies should look forward to
That's what their ideal compensation and workload be if their boss would have their way
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.
You have worked for Musk?
Don't need to, he literally demands that in his tweet.
pretty normal in banking/consulting fields. not sure they write it in the job listing though.
80 hours is mostly a lie for folks experienced enough to have families. What becomes more common is 80+ hours of “I’m responsive whenever I’m asked.”
+1
80 hours - if a low experience employee completed the work, but only 30 hours since I did.
Please add [2014].
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
The biggest changes in this decade about work environment was the death of Matsuri Takahashi. Work environment in big company is significantly improved after that. https://www.mercer.com/insights/law-and-policy/japan-adopts-...
> Shinzo Abe getting shot
Assassinated, you mean.
Typically when a sitting leader of a country gets shot it's not by their own accord.
Assassinated via getting shot, yes.
Done.
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..
That only works if it really is a fit issue/the process is primarily used for fit issues, no?
Otherwise, why would a company headhunt an employee that is doing such a bad job that another company wants to fire them?
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?
this is mostly fantastical nonsense. I go home at 6pm everyday. go outside at 6pm and you will see businesspeople everywhere also on the commute home.
also it is nearly impossible to fire anyone in Japan for anything
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)
Im not disputing the fact that nomikai exists. Ive been to my share. I was simply agreeing with the OP that it is more likely that most Japanese people arent working insane amounts of overtime and black companies arent in the majority. I provided a personal anecdote to reinforce that.
Most people are more than likely getting off at regular hours and going home or out for dinner and drinks (whether you consider that work or not -- they arent being paid). Otherwise the bars and trains wouldnt be packed full of people at 6pm and happy hour wouldnt exist.
So they start work at 12?
I would guess they start around 8 or 9 in the morning.
So they’re working 12 hour days 5 days a week? That sounds like overtime to me.
Not sure why youre being a contrarian. It seems like you didnt bother to understand my post. But yah, start work at 8-9, knock off at 6 to start drinking heavily at the local izakaya, hammered by 8 or 9 and stumbling towards the snack until last train (or later if the company pays for cabs).
I see the same thing everyday.
That’s still 9-10 hours a day. The typical workweek here is 40 hours.
Well your "here" is clearly not Japan. Your confidence about inexperience is weird though.
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.
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.
> 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.
"Not everyone works at black companies" and "nobody works at black companies" are very different statements. People going home at 6 is evidence for the former, not the latter.
Needs a (2014). This was from almost a decade ago.
*over (somehow)
Done.
> (2014)... almost a decade ago.
Oh bummer
I cannot quite believe it but it checks out
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.
“Black Corporations” Still Common in Japan
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01840/
Now do "How American companies oppress workers and run lives". We got wage theft, abuse, sexual harassment, at will firings, wage slavery, and all sorts of fucked up healthcare forcing people to work here. Edit: to say nothing of our prison slave labor here.
A follow-up analysis 10 years later would be really interesting
Anti-communism at it's best.
There are multiple companies in Japan that specialize in quitting people’s jobs by proxy. I assume it helps because you can’t illegally threaten a person through a witness.
https://soranews24.com/2024/11/13/japanese-job-quitting-serv...
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.
Why don't they just emigrate? Work culture seems to be better just about everywhere and on top of that, salaries in Japan are shit, and anyone with half the Japanese work ethics will be a dream employee in U.S. or let alone Europe which is full of entitled, lazy slackers.
At least in IT, it's not even necessary to emigrate- foreign owned companies offer significantly better salaries and working conditions.
The sticking point is English ability. It's genuinely a very difficult thing to learn a second language to the point of being workplace-functional in it, and an additional level of daily stress and mental effort to do everything in your non-native language. The culture here doesn't exactly reward risk-taking and failing in public, and unfortunately becoming proficient in a language requires that you stumble through things a lot while you practice. Furthermore, most Japanese people have experienced fairly ineffective methods of teaching English in schools and ended up rather demoralized about their ability to learn it. (And if you're currently in a job that demands a lot of overtime, when do you study?)
But isn't it kinda mandatory for any IT person to speak usable English, worldwide? Even if super closed societies where language education sucks beyond imagination, like Russia, they mostly do.
Not really, no. Being able to read it is harder to avoid, but usefully communicating in it is not needed in many places.
> The Benesse Group has constantly pursued “Benesse (well-being)” and focused on “people” to support the realization of their dreams and ideals. [0]
This is the black company in the third spot. Curious.
[0] https://www.benesse.co.jp/brand/en/about/
This the parent company that sued the union for going on strike and was struck down on all counts by the Tokyo High Court.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_Berlitz_Ja...