Officially, they came to Japan for training, but in reality, they were forced to work long hours for little pay.
A Japanese court on Monday ordered a sewing company and an employment service to pay 4.4 million yen (52,250 dollars) in damages, ruling that the firms had exploited four Chinese interns.
The High Court in the south-western city of Fukuoka thereby confirmed a lower court ruling and also ordered the factory in Amakusa to pay an additional 12.8 million yen in unpaid wages.
The four interns went to work at the factory in 2006, and for a year, they were forced to work from 8:30 am to as late as 3 am the next morning. They had two or three days off each month.
The case put a spotlight on conditions for foreign interns in Japan and could lead to improvements in their working conditions.
The three-year training programme that the plaintiffs were involved in was introduced 20 years ago as a way to help workers from developing countries develop their skills in Japan and take them back to their home countries, but critics said many of the interns are unskilled labourers who are forced to work for low pay.
Many of their employers are struggling small firms who find few Japanese willing to work for the wages they offer. For them, the internship programme was a welcome one, allowing them to lower their wage costs.
But the programme has also had deadly consequences for workers. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper said that in the 2008-09 fiscal year, which ended March 31, 2009, 34 foreign interns died, 16 from heart attacks or strokes, an occurrence that critics said was the result of overwork.
As a result, a minimum wage for foreign interns was introduced in July and employers warned about exploiting such workers, but critics complained that the structure of the programme remained unchanged. The interns are protected by labour laws but many are still unfairly treated, they said.
Japan is seeing a demographic change at the moment. Its ageing, shrinking population has resulted in a shortage of workers in many areas. Immigration as a solution remains a taboo in Japan.
Trainees
Japan looks for answers as China surges past
Japan’s GDP slump, and news that China’s economy is now bigger, will intensify the search for answers on turning around the economy.
To some, the answer lies offshore. Not in the traditional sense of exporting cars and televisions, but in bringing in new workers from Japan’s rapidly developing neighbours.
The Japanese are good at finding reasons why immigration won’t work, pointing to racial disharmony, problems with integration and culture shock among residents and immigrants. This public view is broadly reflected in government policy.
However, The Australian spoke this week to Hirohiko Nakamura, one of a minority of Japanese politicians who believe in dramatically increasing immigration.
Mr Nakamura, who hails from the conservative leaning Liberal Democratic Party, said Japan’s population was on track to drop from 127 million to just 90 million in the next 45 years, by which time almost 40 per cent would be aged over 65.
“We are already in a state of absolute manpower shortage. It is inevitable that we must take in immigrants to save such a critical situation,” he said.
“We should move towards a 21st-century Japan with a global and multicultural society.”
He believes immigration from Asia would be beneficial throughout the economy, not just in specific sectors. “What’s needed first for Japanese economic growth is securing an unparalleled amount of new labour. The Japanese youth need to learn from the youth of other parts of Asia about diligence and the motivation to live a wealthy life,” he said.
These are strong words in Japan where, according to Mr Nakamura, the many opponents of immigration fall into two camps: believers in Japan’s racial “purity”, and those with more basic concerns about integrating newcomers and perhaps safeguarding their own jobs.
Through the Diet (parliament) Members League to Promote the International Exchange of Human Resources, Mr Nakamura and about 80 other MPs are trying to shift attitudes to immigration.
With a low birth rate and a stalled economy plagued by deflation, immigration is becoming an economic issue as well as a social one.
Since assuming office in June, Prime Minister Naoto Kan has watched as his options for reviving the economy have disappeared.
Japan’s burgeoning public sector debt, and Mr Kan’s pledge for fiscal consolidation, probably rules out another large Keynesian stimulus package. Rates have been at near zero levels since the global financial crisis, but companies remain reluctant to borrow to expand capacity. And now the strong yen is reducing export earnings, applying a further brake on the economy, which grew by a dismal 0.4 per cent in the June quarter, compared to 4.4 per cent in the previous quarter.
Despite the economic gloom, the argument in Japan is not about how fast to grow the population, as in Australia, but whether to grow at all. The former head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, Sakanaka Hidenori, summed up the dilemma in a 2007 essay in which he says Japan must choose between big and small options.
The small option, he says, involves accepting a steep population decline to perhaps 80 million. The trade off for a peaceful and less environmentally damaging lifestyle would be accepting higher taxes and lower benefits.
Mr Hidenori is honest enough to concede that emotionally he favours the small option, but he argues Japan won’t be given the choice. An influx of immigration from China and other rapidly expanding Asian neighbours would prove difficult to control if Japan puts up the drawbridge, he says.
Implementing the big option, though, will not be easy. “The country would need to accept over 20 million immigrants during the next 50 years. Before welcoming such an unprecedented influx, Japan would need to build a national consensus that new arrivals would be welcomed as friends and contributors to Japanese society,” he says. He admits there would be social, environmental and energy costs, but concludes the tide of globalisation is irresistible.
To address labour shortages, Japan has introduced a short-term internship program for unskilled labourers and a scheme to attract foreign nurses. However, both have significant flaws. Under the first program, some trainees have been ruthlessly exploited and effectively worked to death, while the insistence on having nurses pass an arcane and complicated Japanese exam has crippled the effectiveness of the second.
Mr Nakamura said the failures of such schemes were often unjustly blamed on the workers, making his task even harder.
The process of integrating Japan’s Korean community — its most established migrant group — has also been difficult. The Korean-Japanese community, who were originally brought to Japan as forced labourers, cannot vote and must register as aliens unless they become naturalised Japanese, a process some resist because it involves relinquishing their Korean citizenship.
Moves to reintegrate Japan’s South American diaspora to provide extra factory workers have been similarly difficult, so perhaps a fresh approach is needed.
While the government resists meaningful change, cold economic reality may force its hand. Japan remains proud of its economic successes. Its relegation by China this week was too sensitive for some Japanese newspapers to report; several reported only a dry summary of the GDP numbers with scant reference to being usurped by the dragon on their doorstep. Many Japanese won’t be prepared to settle for the economic irrelevance of Hidenori’s small option, and using economic arguments to change people’s views might prove easier than expected.
Govt must improve foreign intern program
The revised Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law took effect in July, enhancing legal protection for foreign interns participating in a government-authorized training program.
However, some observers say the revision of the law merely puts off dealing with the real problems. The program is said to be occupational training in name only, with some going so far as to call it de facto slave labor.
It remains to be seen if the revisions will solve this issue. If the situation does not change, we believe it is meaningless to continue the program.
The current program was established in 1989 to provide foreign nationals with opportunities to learn advanced technology and skills in Japan, thereby becoming forces for development in their own countries.
It has accepted 50,000 to 70,000 young foreign nationals every year for training that can continue up to three years, in fields such as textiles, machinery, metal, food, construction, agriculture and fishing. Over 80 percent of the trainees are Chinese nationals.
Brutal hours, paltry wages
The program has two ways of accepting foreign interns: Companies bring over employees of their own subsidiaries in foreign countries, or organizations of small and midsize firms or agricultural groups accept interns and send them to member companies or farms for training. The overwhelming majority of problems occur in the latter segment.
Many irregularities in the program were pointed out during Diet deliberations to revise the law, such as foreign trainees working long hours and being paid below-minimum wages of about 300 yen per hour. Some trainees reportedly cannot quit the program midway through because the agencies in their countries that sent them to Japan will demand large penalty charges.
A majority of trainees are said to be unskilled laborers who only want to make money in this country.
The 31-year-old Chinese intern who died suddenly in 2008 while working at a metal plating company in Ibaraki Prefecture is a typical case. He was allegedly forced to work for low pay and to put in 100 to 150 hours of overtime every month. He was allowed only two days off per month.
A labor standards inspection office in the prefecture intends to recognize his death as the result of overwork.
In 2008, labor offices around the country instructed companies to improve labor conditions for foreign trainees in a total of 2,612 cases.
The reality is far from the program’s ideal of contributing to the international community. It seems industries that cannot hire Japanese workers have been taking advantage of it to quietly use foreign labor.
Wishful thinking
The revised law stipulates that the Labor Standards Law and the Minimum Wage Law apply to foreign trainees from their first year in the program; under the old law, they applied only from the second year. The revised law also requires industrial organizations to strengthen their instruction and supervision of member companies that accept foreign interns.
However, some of the companies using foreign interns have been ignoring labor-related regulations. Many industrial organizations and their member companies are like fraternities–can we really expect these organizations to strictly supervise their members?
Many trainees have to go home because the companies they work for suddenly go bankrupt. At the very least, the revised law should have included a measure to prohibit struggling companies from accepting interns.
The government-authorized program has become a legal loophole for hiring unskilled foreign laborers. The government must move forward with discussions on how this country should accept foreign workers in the future.
Strict immigration rules may threaten Japan’s future
Her new country needs her, her new employer adores her, and Joyce Anne Paulino, who landed here 14 months ago knowing not a word of the language, can now say in Japanese that she’d like very much to stay. But Paulino, 31, a nurse from the Philippines, worries about the odds. To stay in Japan long-term, she must pass a test that almost no foreigner passes.
For Japan, maintaining economic relevance in the next decades hinges on its ability — and its willingness — to grow by seeking outside help. Japan has long had deep misgivings about immigration and has tightly controlled the ability of foreigners to live and work here.
But with the country’s population expected to fall from 127 million to below 100 million by 2055, Prime Minister Naoto Kan last month took a step toward loosening Japan’s grip on immigration, outlining a goal to double the number of highly skilled foreign workers within a decade.
In Japan, just 1.7 percent of the population (or roughly 2.2 million people) is foreign or foreign-born. Foreigners represent small slices of almost every sector of the economy, but they also represent the one slice of the population with a chance to grow. Japan is on pace to have three workers for every two retirees by 2060.
But the economic partnership program that brought Paulino and hundreds of other nurses and caretakers to Japan has a flaw. Indonesian and Filipino workers who come to care for a vast and growing elderly population cannot stay for good without passing a certification test. And that test’s reliance on high-level Japanese — whose characters these nurses cram to memorize — has turned the test into a de facto language exam.
Ninety percent of Japanese nurses pass the test. This year, three of 254 immigrants passed it. The year before, none of 82 passed.
For immigrant advocates, a pass-or-go-home test with a success rate of less than 1 percent creates a wide target for criticism — especially at a time when Japan’s demographics are increasing the need for skilled foreign labor.
For many officials in the government and the medical industry, however, difficulties with the program point to a larger dilemma confronting a country whose complex language and resistance to foreigners make it particularly tough to penetrate.
Kan’s goal to double the number of skilled foreign workers seems reasonable enough, given that Japan currently has 278,000 college-educated foreign workers — the United States has more than 8 million, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — but it meets some resistance.
An Asahi Shimbun newspaper poll in June asked Japanese about accepting immigrants to “maintain economic vitality.” Twenty-six percent favored the idea. Sixty-five percent opposed it. And the likelihood of substantive changes in immigration policy took a major hit, experts said, when Kan’s ruling Democratic Party of Japan saw setbacks in parliamentary elections this month.
Political analysts now paint a grim picture of a country at legislative impasse. Foreigners such as Paulino find it difficult to get here, difficult to thrive and difficult to stay, and at least for now, Kan’s government will have a difficult time changing any of that.
‘A lack of urgency’
“There’s a lack of urgency or lack of sense of crisis for the declining population in Japan,” said Satoru Tominaga, director of Garuda, an advocacy group for Indonesian nurse and caretaker candidates. “We need radical policy change to build up the number” of such workers. “However, Japan lacks a strong government; if anything, it’s in chaos.”
When Japan struck economic partnership agreements with Indonesia and the Philippines, attracting nurses and caretakers wasn’t the primary objective. Japan sought duty-free access for its automakers to the Southeast Asian market. Accepting skilled labor was just part of the deal.
But by 2025, Japan will need to almost double its number of nurses and care workers, currently at 1.2 million. And because of the test, substandard language skills, not substandard caretaking skills, are keeping the obvious solution from meeting the gaping need.
The 998 Filipino and Indonesian nurses and caretakers who’ve come to Japan since 2008 all have, at minimum, college educations or several years of professional experience. Nurses can stay for three years, with three chances to pass the test. Other caregivers can stay for four years, with one chance to pass. Those who arrive in Japan take a six-month language cram class and then begin work as trainees.
They are allotted a brief period every workday — 45 minutes, in Paulino’s case — for language study. Many also study for hours at night.
“The language skills, that is a huge hurdle for them,” said Kiichi Inagaki, an official at the Japan International Corporation for Welfare Services, which oversees the program. “However, if you go around the hospital, you understand how language is important. Nurses are dealing with medical technicalities. They are talking to doctors about what is important. In order to secure a safe medical system, they need a very high standard of Japanese.”
Advocates for foreign nurses and caregivers do not play down the importance of speaking and understanding Japanese. But they emphasize that the Japanese characters for medical terminology are among the hardest to learn; perhaps some jargon-heavy portion of the certification test, they say, could be given in English or workers’ native language.
A new culture
When Paulino boarded a flight from Manila to Tokyo in May 2009, she had a sense of trepidation and adventure — not that she could express it in Japanese. She saw her mission as a way to make better money and “explore herself,” she said. Her first chance for exploration came onboard, when a meal of rice, which she doesn’t like, came with chopsticks, which she didn’t know how to use.
“All the way to Japan, we were joking about that,” said Fritzie Perez, a fellow Filipino nurse who sat in the same row. “We were saying, ‘Joyce, how are you going to eat?’ ”
Now eight months into her stint at the Tamagawa Subaru nursing home, Paulino feels comfortable speaking and joking with the elderly people she cares for.
“She did have problems initially, especially in the Japanese language, but there’s been so much improvement,” said Keisuke Isozaki, head of caretaking at the home. “She’s not capable of writing things down for the record, but otherwise she’s as capable as any Japanese staffer.”
Paulino said she is nervous about her test, scheduled for January 2013. This month, 33 nurses and caretakers returned to their home countries, discouraged with their chances.
Her friend, Perez, described the language study and the caretaking as “serving two masters at the same time.”
“When I get home, that’s when I study,” Paulino said. “But every time I read my book, I start to fall asleep. It’s bothering me. Because [the test] is only one chance. And I don’t know if I can get it.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/27/AR2010072706053.html
The only Filipino nurse to pass Japan’s nursing exam
Ever Lalin, like others in the first batch of 98 nurses and caregivers who went to Japan May last year for a training stint preparatory to taking the Japanese nursing licensure exam, had no prior lessons in the Niponggo language.
“Halimaw ah (A monster’s feat),” cheered nurse bloggers when it was announced last March that Ever, 34, was the only Filipino to pass the difficult licensure exam and the only foreign applicant to get it on the first try. Two Indonesians who had arrived a year earlier also passed. The exam included a proficiency test in “kanji,” Chinese characters that are a mindset away from those schooled in the Roman alphabet.
Director Nimpha De Guzman of the Welfare and Employment Office of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) noted that tests had showed Ever had a high aptitude for languages.
The nurse from Abra, noted De Guzman, had spent four years working in a hospital in Saudi Arabia and came home speaking fluent Arabic.
Interviewed via email for a presentation prepared by POEA-TV for the recent Migrant Workers Day celebration, Ever was quoted as saying it must have been her high motivation and dogged determination—for her professional satisfaction as well as the financial advancement of her family.
“I studied so hard…every minute counted,” she had told De Guzman. She took advanced Japanese review classes.
There was another thing going for Ever that other equally motivated Filipino nurses may not have had. The hospital she was assigned to—Ashikaga Red Cross Hospital—had a special intervention program for foreign trainees like Ever. A Japanese staff member was assigned to be her mentor, De Guzman shared.
Right after she got her Japanese nursing license, the Ashikaga hospital handed Ever an upgraded appointment to the emergency room, reportedly a section of her choice.
While learning Japanese may be difficult for a nation so long concerned with learning English, said officials, it’s not impossible. Inspired by Ever’s example, a new batch of trainees under the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement has been dispatched.
Japan’s trainee programme ‘human trafficking’: lawyer
A Japanese human rights lawyer Thursday labelled a government-backed foreign trainee programme as a “form of human trafficking”, saying dozens had died from apparent overwork.
Japan has invited tens of thousands of foreigners for industrial training programmes as low-wage apprentices, mostly from China, Indonesia and the Philippines, since the 1990s, officially so they can learn new skills.
“There is a huge difference between the purpose of this system and the reality,” said Lila Abiko of the Lawyers’ Network for Trainees in Japan.
“The purpose they say is the international contribution through transferring technologies through the person from a developing country. But actually this system functions to receive cheap unskilled labourers and exploit them.”
The Japanese government, which allows little immigration of unskilled workers, started the trainees’ programme in 1993, after the world’s second-largest economy dived into a serious downturn.
Amid rising concern over abuses, the lawyer said that a record 35 workers from Asia had died in Japan in the year to March 2009 alone.
The Japan International Training Cooperation Organization (JITCO), which oversees the programmes, had said last year that of these 16 had died of heart and brain ailments, five in workplace accidents and one had committed suicide.
A JITCO spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
The following year, 27 deaths were reported, including nine from heart and brain ailments and three suicides, Abiko said.
This month a Japanese labour office for the first time recognised that a Chinese intern employed under the programme had become the victim of what in Japan is called “karoshi” or “death through overwork.”
Jiang Xiao Dong, 31, from Jiangsu province died after a heart attack in June 2008 after working more than 100 hours overtime the month before at a metal processing firm northeast of Tokyo.
Abiko, who represents Jiang’s family, said one of his time cards showed he had worked 350 hours in November 2007 alone.
She said many of the interns had paid high deposits in their home countries, often equivalent to several years’ income, to unauthorised local brokers who helped them register for the programme and travel to Japan.
“I think this is one form of human trafficking, especially when they are seized by the throat because of the deposit,” she said.
One Chinese trainee, Li Quing Zhi, 34, said he came in 2007 to learn Japanese cooking but instead did manual work at a manufacturing workshop at minimum wage, working 150 hours of unpaid overtime a month.
After repeated complaints he was fired in March, leaving him stranded.
“I cannot go back to China without getting the payment that I deserve,” said the man, who said his wife and two children are waiting for him.
Jorge Bustamante, UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, issued a warning in April about the trainee programmes.
The Justice Ministry was not available for comment when contacted late Thursday by AFP.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gXN3sBZiNLSKHP3WYJ_8Qj2PROjA
Dying to work: Japan Inc.’s foreign trainees
“The Industrial Trainees and Technical Interns program often fuels demand for exploitative cheap labor under conditions that constitute violations of the right to physical and mental health, physical integrity, freedom of expression and movement of foreign trainees and interns, and that in some cases may well amount to slavery. This program should be discontinued and replaced by an employment program.”
JORGE BUSTAMANTE, U.N. SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF MIGRANTS, APRIL 2010
According to Lila Abiko of the Lawyers’ Network for Trainees, foreign “trainees” and “interns” are really just cheap migrant labor under another name.
Although the official purpose of the training and internship program is “international contribution and cooperation through human resource development of technology,” Abiko believes the reality is very different.
“There is a big gap between this system’s purpose and the reality. This is a fundamental problem,” she said.
Abiko argues that the trainee and intern system developed the way it did in Japan because of innate problems in the country’s immigration law.
In 1989, at the height of Japan’s bubble economy, an amendment was made to the Immigration and Control and Refugee Recognition Act that established the new “trainee” status-of-residence category.
At this time, a massive need for labor had developed as a result of Japan’s booming economy, but public opposition to the notion of accepting unskilled foreign labor en masse remained high.
Fearful of upsetting public opinion but under pressure from corporate Japan, the government decided to let in foreign migrant workers as “trainees.” At the same time it also granted Brazilians of Japanese descent long-term residency status.
Thus, Abiko claims, corporate Japan’s hunger for labor was largely sated, but a system had been formed whose true intentions were concealed behind a facade of altruistic intentions.
Originating mainly from China and Southeast Asia, trainees and interns are lured to Japan with the promise that they will acquire skills and knowledge they can later use in their own country. Instead, many of them get low-paid, unskilled jobs, minus the basic rights and safeguards any Japanese worker would enjoy.
Recent amendments to the Immigration Control Act, which also included changes to Japan’s alien registration card system, have improved the situation for participants of the internship program, although arguably it is a case of too little, too late.
Under the old system, those in the first year of the program were officially classed as “trainees,” not workers, meaning they were unable to claim the protections Japanese labor law affords regular employees.
For example, the minimum wage in Japan varies according to prefecture, and currently the national average is ¥713 per hour. But as foreign trainees are not technically “workers,” employers are not obliged to pay them even this. Instead, they receive a monthly “trainee allowance,” which for most first-year trainees falls between ¥60,000 and ¥80,000 — the equivalent to an hourly wage in the range of ¥375 to ¥500 for a full-time 40-hour week.
For first-year trainees, trying to survive on such a low income is a real struggle, so most have to do a great deal of overtime just to make ends meet.
Although the “trainee” residency status still exists for foreign workers who arrived before 2010, it is currently being phased out, and from 2011 all first-year participants in the program will be classed as technical interns. This a significant step forward, as the Labor Standards Law and the Minimum Wage Act apply to foreign migrant workers with technical-intern residency status. However, whether migrant workers are actually able to access the protections they are entitled to is another matter, and the issue of oversight — or the lack of it — is still a long way from being resolved.
Abiko believes this absence of proper oversight has grown out of the internship program’s weak regulatory structure and a general lack of government accountability. The government entrusts most of the operations of the internship program to JITCO, an authority that lacks the power to sanction participating organizations or companies, says Abiko.
“JITCO is just a charitable organization. It is very clear that JITCO is not appropriate to regulate and monitor this program.”
In addition, she argues, the financial relationship between JITCO and the collectives or companies under which trainees work makes JITCO’s role as a regulatory body even more untenable. JITCO’s total income for the 2008 financial year was ¥2.94 billion. More than half this amount, ¥1.66 billion, came from “support membership fees” paid by the companies themselves.
“How can JITCO appropriately regulate and monitor their support members when they are dependent on them for membership fees?” she said.
Stop exploiting trainees as cheap labor: lawyers
It is high time the government faced facts and scrapped its industrial training and internship program because it is used to exploit foreign trainees as a cheap source of labor, a lawyer group said Thursday, claiming the purpose of the system and its reality are worlds apart.
The trainee system is touted as making an international contribution by transferring Japan’s industrial expertise to people from developing countries. But in reality, foreign trainees are underpaid and overworked without being given a chance to learn any skills, according to Lawyers’ Network for Trainees.
“A drastic review of the program is necessary. . . . The system is functioning to receive cheap unskilled laborers and exploit them,” lawyer Lila Abiko, the group’s secretary general, said in Tokyo at The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.
Pointing at the death of a Chinese trainee in Ibaraki Prefecture in 2008 that was recognized as “karoshi” (death from overwork) by a labor office in the prefecture early this month, Abiko said the case is only “the tip of the iceberg.”
Twenty-seven foreign nationals, most of them in their 20s and 30s, who came to Japan under the training program died in fiscal 2009, marking the second-highest tally on record after the 35 deaths seen the year before. An earlier report on the 2009 fatalities said nine died of brain or heart disease, four died while working, three committed suicide, three died in bicycle accidents and the rest died of unknown causes.
The training and internship programs, established in 1993 by the government, allow foreigners to work as technical interns at companies for up to two years after they undergo a year of training.
“I lost all heart,” said Li Quing Zhi, a 34-year-old Chinese, who also attended the news conference.
Zhi, who came to Japan under the program in 2007, said he worked from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day at a fixture-making company in Saitama Prefecture with only 21 days off a year. He was paid only part of his overtime wages for the first year, just ¥400 per hour. After he complained, Zhi’s work was ended last March.
“If the Japanese industry needs labor from foreign countries, Japanese citizens have to discuss how to accept them as labor with a full guarantee of labor rights. In this system, they are not guaranteed labor rights,” Abiko said.
Japan Training Program Is Said to Exploit Workers
Six young Chinese women arrived in this historic city three summers ago, among the tens of thousands of apprentices brought to Japan each year on the promise of job training, good pay and a chance at a better life back home.
Instead, the women say, they were subjected to 16-hour workdays assembling cellphones at below the minimum wage, with little training of any sort, all under the auspices of a government-approved “foreign trainee” program that critics call industrial Japan’s dirty secret.
“My head hurt, my throat stung,” said Zhang Yuwei, 23, who operated a machine that printed cellphone keypads, battling fumes that she said made the air so noxious that managers would tell Japanese employees to avoid her work area.
Ms. Zhang says she was let go last month after her employer found that she and five compatriots had complained to a social worker about their work conditions. A Japanese lawyer is now helping the group sue their former employer, seeking back pay and damages totaling $207,000.
Critics say foreign trainees have become an exploited source of cheap labor in a country with one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations and lowest birthrates. All but closed to immigration, Japan faces an acute labor shortage, especially for jobs at the country’s hardscrabble farms or small family-run factories.
“The mistreatment of trainees appears to be widespread,” said Shoichi Ibusuki, a human rights [and Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union] lawyer based in Tokyo.
From across Asia, about 190,000 trainees — migrant workers in their late teens to early 30s — now toil in factories and farms in Japan. They have been brought to the country, in theory, to learn technical expertise under an international aid program started by the Japanese government in the 1990s.
For businesses, the government-sponsored trainee program has offered a loophole to hiring foreign workers. But with little legal protection, the indentured work force is exposed to substandard, sometimes even deadly, working conditions, critics say.
Government records show that at least 127 of the trainees have died since 2005 — or one of about every 2,600 trainees, which experts say is a high death rate for young people who must pass stringent physicals to enter the program. Many deaths involved strokes or heart failure that worker rights groups attribute to the strain of excessive labor.
The Justice Ministry found more than 400 cases of mistreatment of trainees at companies across Japan in 2009, including failing to pay legal wages and exposing trainees to dangerous work conditions. This month, labor inspectors in central Japan ruled that a 31-year-old Chinese trainee, Jiang Xiaodong, had died from heart failure induced by overwork.
Under pressure by human rights groups and a string of court cases, the government has begun to address some of the program’s worst abuses. The United Nations has urged Japan to scrap it altogether.
After one year of training, during which the migrant workers receive subsistence pay below the minimum wage, trainees are allowed to work for two more years in their area of expertise at legal wage levels. But interviews with labor experts and a dozen trainees indicate that the foreign workers seldom achieve those pay rates.
On paper, the promised pay still sounds alluring to the migrant workers. Many are from rural China, where per-capita disposable income can be as low as $750 a year. To secure a spot in the program, would-be trainees pay many times that amount in fees and deposits to local brokers, sometimes putting up their homes as collateral — which can be confiscated if trainees quit early or cause trouble.
The Japan International Training Cooperation Organization, or Jitco, which operates the program, said it was aware some companies had abused the system and that it was taking steps to crack down on the worst cases. The organization plans to ensure that “trainees receive legal protection, and that cases of fraud are eliminated,” Jitco said in a written response to questions.
Ms. Zhang says she paid $8,860 to a broker in her native Hebei Province for a spot in the program. She was assigned to a workshop run by Modex-Alpha, which assembles cellphones sold by Sharp and other electronics makers. Ms. Zhang said her employer demanded her passport and housed her in a cramped apartment with no heat, alongside five other trainees.
In her first year, Ms. Zhang worked eight-hour days and received $660 a month after various deductions, according to her court filing — about $3.77 an hour, or less than half the minimum wage level in Hiroshima. Moreover, all but $170 a month was forcibly withheld by the company as savings, and paid out only after Ms. Zhang pushed the company for the full amount, she said.
In her second year, her monthly wage rose to about $1,510 — or $7.91 an hour, according to her filing. That was still lower than the $8.56 minimum wage for the electronics industry in Hiroshima. And her employers withheld all but $836 a month for her accommodations and other expenses, according to her filing.
And as her wages went up, so did her hours, she said, to as many as 16 a day, five to six days a week. Modex-Alpha declined to comment on Ms. Zhang’s account, citing her lawsuit against the company.
As part of the government’s effort to clean up the program, beginning July 1, minimum wage and other labor protections have for the first time been applied to first-year workers. The government has also banned the confiscating of trainees’ passports.
But experts say it will be hard to change the program’s culture.
Economic strains are also a factor. Although big companies like Toyota and Mazda have moved much of their manufacturing to China to take advantage of low wages there, smaller businesses have found that impossible — and yet are still pressured to drive down costs.
“If these businesses hired Japanese workers, they would have to pay,” said Kimihiro Komatsu, a labor consultant in Hiroshima. “But trainees work for a bare minimum,” he said. “Japan can’t afford to stop.”
For almost three years, Catherine Lopez, 28, a trainee from Cebu, the Philippines, has worked up to 14 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, welding parts at a supplier for the Japanese carmaker Mazda. She receives as little as $1,574 a month, or $7.91 an hour — below the $8.83 minimum wage for auto workers in Hiroshima.
Ms. Lopez says Japanese managers at the supplier, Kajiyama Tekko, routinely hurl verbal abuses at her cohort of six trainees, telling them to follow orders or “swim back to the Philippines.”
“We came to Japan because we want to learn advanced technology,” Ms. Lopez said.
Yukari Takise, a manager at Kajiyama Tekko, denied the claims. “If they don’t like it here,” she said, “they can go home.”
But after inquiries by a reporter for The New York Times, a company that organizes the trainee program in Hiroshima, Ateta Japan, said it had advised Kajiyama Tekko to recalculate the wages it pays foreign trainees and ordered it to grant the vacation days owed to the trainees.
“They may have pushed the trainees too hard,” said Hideki Matsunishi, Ateta’s president. “But you must also feel sympathy for the companies, who are all struggling in this economy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/business/global/21apprentice.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
Department stores and sweat shops
It’s one Japan for rich Chinese shoppers, another for low-skilled workers
Many Japanese strive to keep up egalitarian appearances. Porsche drivers keep their cars tactfully hidden away. Houses of the well-heeled are unflashy. In the finest department stores, even the demure “elevator girls” are treated with impeccable politeness.
But when it comes to the way Japan treats its nouveau riche neighbour, China, different rules apply. Two events this month betray the double standards with which Japanese officialdom treats China’s rich and poor. On July 1st Japan relaxed visa requirements for well-off Chinese tourists. It was not stated how much anyone needed to earn to apply for one. But as long as they had at least a gold credit card and a solid professional or civil-service job to go back to, they were free to come to Japan, to shop until they dropped.
Far from the bright lights of Japan’s shopping districts, however, young Chinese working in small industrial firms get anything but red-carpet treatment. On July 5th Kyodo, a news agency, reported that 21 Chinese were among 27 foreign trainees who died last year on a government-sponsored skills-transfer scheme for developing countries that over the past four years has brought in an average of 94,000 workers a year, mostly from China.
Of the 27, nine died of heart or brain diseases, four died while working and three committed suicide. A few days earlier officials confirmed that a 31-year-old Chinese trainee who died in 2008 after clocking up about 100 hours a month of overtime was the victim not of heart failure, as originally reported, but of “karoshi”, the Japanese affliction of death from overwork.
Japan International Training Co-operation Organisation, the outfit set up by five government ministries to oversee the skills-transfer programme, refuses to discuss the deaths. But Lila Abiko, of the Lawyers’ Network for Foreign Trainees, an NGO, says many guest-workers do so much low-paid overtime—with the support of their employers—that they literally work themselves to death. The mortality rate from heart disease and other stress-related ailments among trainees in their 20s and 30s is almost double that of Japanese of the same age, she says. “Japan is the richest country in Asia, yet this programme is exploiting poor Chinese like slaves.”
Japan’s shrinking population is at the root of both phenomena. As domestic spending declines, Japan needs wealthy Chinese tourists to help prop up the local economy, and low-skilled Chinese trainees to help man its factories. Figures for both have climbed .
The worse the demographics become, the more useful it may be for Japan to have China on its doorstep. But for the moment, the best many Chinese can say about Japan is that they love its products. That is not the basis for an enduring affinity.