> "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.
Sure, but the inexplicable bit is that there's no actual reason it has to be that way.
There's no reason why a law cannot be passed amending the tax code to make health insurance premiums paid by an individual tax deductible.
I'm not saying it would be easy to get such a law passed, but that doesn't change the fact that it's stupid to have health insurance tied to your employer.
(At any rate, health insurance premiums are tax deductible, but the rules are annoying and require that your healthcare spending be a certain percentage of your income.)
Right, but we're currently at a point politically where we're heavily considering regressions in healthcare and insurance, not progressions. We're talking about bringing back denying coverage for existing conditions and allowing insurance to deny medication on grounds of religious reasons.
Changing the tax deduction status would harm businesses, and therefore I can't see a conservative administration ever letting that fly.
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
"Most people" are not dependent on health insurance for their average needs, except in the long-term or unexpectedly.
Then of course, being unemployed, you have the option of COBRA (you probably don't want that though), and if it does not make you immediately eligible for Medicaid in your state (40 of 50 have Medicaid expansion), it would make you eligible for the ACA subsidized plans. NB: more than one-third of employer-sponsored plans are HDHPs, meaning employees have deductibles in the thousands of dollars anyway.
It's certainly a disruption, and it's one more thing to consider, but the idea that "most Americans" are one job loss away from being killed by lack of health care is not remotely true - most people don't need health care that regularly, unemployed people have insurance options, and at a last resort, for the most part, you can accrue unlimited medical debt in most places with few real-world consequences.
Birth control is available over the counter in the US. If you have specific need, it’s very cheap and your doctor will almost always just call in refills without charging you. The meds themselves are not expensive.
Annual visits are also not actually that important. They’re perfunctory. They can certainly be put off for a few months in a ok except a few one in a million cases.
And at any rate, as I said, losing your job in the US means your insurance is disrupted, not that you are now uninsured. Pregnancy even in states without Medicaid expansion will get the mother and child on Medicaid.
Of course, at the risk of being silly, it’s also true that missing a day of birth control is not what got your wife pregnant. ;) it’s pretty surprising to me how many people (now with children) thought birth control meant they wouldn’t get pregnant. There definitely needs to be better education on this. Taking birth control, even regularly, even with an IUD, is more like a backstop and should not be relied on for your primary protection. The odds are low but when you play them a few times a week for ten years…
If you lose healthcare """insurance""" when you lose your job, you never had real insurance to start with.
(The system might work if some lag was introduced (a year of keeping that level of insurance??), but I'm not sure that this duration would not quickly get sapped by perverse incentives ?)
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.
Sure. The point is that the employer does all the selecting of options and the patient/employer has to take what the employer chose. No market for the patient.
We left the free market of healthcare behind because it was awful for consumers. People who were disabled or otherwise had chronic conditions were, more or less, completely screwed. Not to mention these regulations are very much necessary. We want educated and highly certified doctors cutting you up.
Aren't healthcare costs in line with the very high US income levels (with people spending a high fraction of their income in it, because they can afford to), and the main issue is inequality (including lack of real insurance)?
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.
Poor people don't save because they are poor and there's nothing to save.
It costs loads more to be poor than to have some money. You won't save money by buying up-front, if your credit is low you'll pay more than a person with more money, you miss payments and the late fees rack up, you overdraft and your fees add up, you can't go on autopay to save money because you risk going into overdraft, etc.
Maybe if the 1% didn't own 50% off all the resources (money) than poor people could find some money to save.
I'm looking at the data and there is zero relationship between inflation, interest rates and personal savings in the USA. People save in time of crisis (2008, covid, etc.), and don't when the economy is good (1990 -> 2007)
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.
In what way is losing income from quitting different in at-will vs the article? Losing the income is a consequence, but it's the same consequence in both cases and so is not part of the conversation and silly to mention.
> In what way is losing income from quitting different in at-will vs the article?
This question isn’t relevant to the claim that I am responding to.
> Losing the income is a consequence, but it's the same consequence in both cases and so is not part of the conversation
You’re right that having no income is the same as having no income, and the manner in which it was lost does not matter.
But the state of “having no income” does indeed matter. That statement is relevant to this conversation due to gp’s claim that losing income and health insurance are not “practical repercussions” of losing employment. That’s a naïveté that a stable society cannot abide.
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?
Yes, naturally such a system is biased towards high accountability and high trust industries. Industries which thrive on minimal accountability and trust won't function very well. Personally, I think that's a good thing overall. The problem comes in when other countries don't operate this way, so those businesses can just go there (and take your talent with you, i.e. brain drain).
> 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.
That and other reasons (few vacantion days, request to overtime, etc) is why one should avoid American companies in Europe, if possible.
> Most people can and if you can’t then the government pays for it.
For now.
> The relative ease with which most people can get another job is also nice.
This seems unemphathetic. Even just for the tech industry, thousands of engineers have found it difficult to find new work after the layoffs of the previous years. Please do not extrapolate your experience of the ease of finding new work towards every other American.
> It is an economy that is structured under the assumption that people will move between jobs and minimizes the friction in doing so.
No. Even if you look at it from a process perspective, true minimized friction is when other countries goverments automatically deduct and manage your taxes when you move jobs, manage retirement funds and have socialized healthcare to reduce the stress and uncertainty during unemployment. You claim that "at-will" minimizes friction is a joke compared to those.
>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.
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.
The notice period is kinda odd. I've known people who want to leave immediately and haven't had a lot of trouble doing so because the relationship with their employer has soured that much.
Paid by the doctor? I think sick pay comes from the employer initially and later statutory sick pay(state).
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.
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.
If there is bad blood leading up to the termination, then I guess so. I haven't witnessed that more than once or twice in my career.
Most people make an extra effort to end on a positive note, both with colleagues and managers. Of course, effectively off-boarding yourself means having progressively less and less to do as time goes by... So in that sense you sort of quiet quit.
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.
I don’t know statistics but here in Germany many people have insurance that pays for attorneys in case of conflicts related to employment and would make use of 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 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.
It can be a totally different experience if you have a chronic illness that affects your schedule, or if you don't have a car. In my case it's been both. Currently, lack of reliable transportation and a driver's license is the main issue.
I've been struggling to even get an interview in junior software dev for over a year now. Tried some help desk as well and never heard back. I've had my resume looked at quite a few times now, so I doubt that that's the problem.
If you go to r/jobs and related subreddits, there are plenty of people who are losing their minds after applying to thousands of jobs for the last 2 years without even getting a prescreen. Some are even being rejected by temp agencies. I assume that this is an anomaly and 2023-24 had a uniquely terrible job market.
I had a long gap between employers where I lived off of saved money and explored new tech with a hope that I'd be able to improve my standing in the market. It made it nearly impossible to get anyone interested in my application because the gap was years.
Once I'd finally changed that by working a temp gig (having now achieved recent employment), I started getting calls. The job I took required visiting clients on-site from time to time. They didn't think to ask me if I had a car or license. When they found out (as I took a company-paid Uber 25m in my second month), I sensed that they realized they'd left a huge gap in their interview process. I was reassigned to only visit clients that I could get to via a combination of train and ride-share or short ride-share.
Had they asked about long-distance on-sites and my ability to get there myself, I'm confident I wouldn't have been hired.
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?
I’d say in the US there is a unique situation because health care is tied to employment, or it’s insanely expensive. When the job market is not great, you see increased costs and more exploitation of those employed.
I was stunned when I realised my Irish work contracts had a forced notice period, not just a courtesy. Accenture uses this as a tool to stop people quitting - forced three month notice even for super low level employees. Makes it hard to interview for new jobs!
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
> Having seen the perverse incentives this creates and the various ways in which it can be abused
Could you list any examples? Because I honestly don't see any way where potentially getting fired for no reason on the spot would be the beneficial option that you claim.
I've btw never heard of anyone where I live getting sued or unable to quit a job.
1. While it is technically true a company could sue a worker for quitting, the amount of damages they'd have to show is far beyond anything they'd be able to do outside of an upper management position. As far as I know, you could not sue someone for doing a half assed job.
2. I'm not even sure how you are using the word "illegal" here. AFAIK there is no provisions in criminal law for punishing people who break employment contracts. What I assume you are talking about is that a contract worker is bound by the terms of their contract as far as notice to quit goes, but there are a couple of limits to this.
- This only applies in the first year of the contract. After the contract has been renewed once, standard Japanese labor law applies, which is two weeks of notice.
- Similar to the above statement about suing someone for quitting, Japanese law only allows for suits to be for actual damages, so the company would have to prove significant damages to make the suit worth it. Contract workers are generally not high value employees so it would be unusual for one to be worth suing over.
A judge would automatically throw out the case if this was the argument for suing an employee. The reasoning being, if you continued to pay the employee during the term of their employment, and you knew that the employee was not performing based on some KPI or some yard stick, you would issue warning to the employee to improve their performance, or you would fire the employee on the spot. Continuing keep an underperforming employee is giving tactic consent that their work is reasonably acceptable because if it wasn't, you would start disciplinary action or cease their employment.
Threating a employee with coercive threats (such as threats of legal action) is going to land the business into hot water in any modern society.
> 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.
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.
> If an employee, for example, decides to put in notice and then half-ass their job until their departure date, a company could actually sue the employee and win.
That sounds rather exaggerated. There may have been cases of an employee being sued for damages by their a employer for not performing their jobs well, but I've personally never heard of them and without digging deep into courts records, I doubt there are many of these.
The reason I highly doubt that, is that even just firing employees in Japan who are half-assing their job requires going to court and providing ample evidence that the employee has been continuously under-performing even though they were notified, given opportunity and failed to improve.
This standard is considered so high, that Japanese companies rarely fire employees for this type of reason (Ordinary termination 普通解雇 futsuu kaiko). When companies absolutely want to get rid of a certain employee, they often prefer to slowly make the employee's life miserable by giving them them demeaning tasks (or in some cases just no tasks at all!), bullying them and cutting their pay — a practice generally called iyagarase (roughly translated as "making someone feeling unpleasant"). That kind of play can also land the employer in legal trouble, but at least the burden of proof would fall on the employee. In many other cases still, companies just keep around employees that are under performing or convince them to take an voluntary retirement package.
In addition to all of that, employment contracts generally require a 30 day notice before quitting in Japan (I guess this is the maximum set by law). Combine that with the fact that most employees tend to have at least 14 days of unused leave accumulated, which they'd use just before leaving, they're not left with so enough working days in which they can half-ass their jobs.
I'm not quite sure about breaking your contract for contract employees, but it the original example ("I'll be threatened that I will have to pay damages for quitting") doesn't seem like a contract employee, and the term "black companies" and the discourse around usually refers to full-time employment. It's probably just threats, as the quote says. Managers sometimes say the craziest things to scare their companies out of quitting.
> If an employee, for example, decides to put in notice and then half-ass their job until their departure date,
Suppose you are fired, and the company decides unilaterally to halve your salary during the notice period, wouldn't you get nasty about it?
> if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date
As long as it is illegal for the company to fire you as well, I don't see any problem. Why should a party of a contract be free to breach it at will while the other remains constrained?
> I don't see any problem. Why should a party of a contract be free to breach it at will while the other remains constrained?
Companies are run to make money, while people usually enter employment contracts in order to have money to feed their families and survive. Humans usually come to the consensus that people are more important than profits.
A company doesn't need to be doing anything illegal for the working conditions to be unsafe. I am still boycotting Paris Baguette and their sister companies because of their stubbornness and refusal to go beyond the legal minimums in safety equipment.
2 years ago a 23-year old employee got pulled into a sauce making machine and was crushed to death, with nobody finding her body until the next day. Let's say you are a bright 22-year old from the Philippines who got offered 3x your peers salary for working at an industrial bakery. It doesn't sound so bad right? Now let's say your friend got killed by machinery, and the company refuses to take responsibility because the safety equipment that could have prevented their death was optional and not legally required. You're 4 months into your 12-month contract. Do you have enough money to even get a flight back home? Do you have enough money to break your contract and pay the company for your flight from your home country, pay the company for breaking your subsidized lease in the dorms, etc? No you don't. That is a bad situation to be in. If it were me I would break the contract and just never come back to Korea. They're not going to extradite you for this debt, but does everyone know that? Especially migrant workers?
Now I know this is about Japan and not Korea. Look into how many Vietnamese go work in the textile industry in Japan and get injured. Should there really be more barriers and intimidation when it comes to forcing the workers to stay for the duration of their contract when their roommate was crippled by the machinery? Or should it be easier for people to leave potentially dangerous situations?
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This also applies to white collar workers. Do you know how many Indian college students are lured to go work at a Japanese company with the promise of a high salary, only to then move to Tokyo and realize they're spending way more money than they expected due to the higher COL? Companies absolutely take advantage of this system. In the US companies usually only offer contracts to highly skilled workers, while in other countries companies offer contracts in order to trap individuals into poor working conditions and being underpaid when they're naive to the job market.
I live in Japan and while also not a lawyer I've had experiences with the labor bureau - this is totally false, and even explicitly stated in the Labor Standards Act:
"Article 5: An employer must not force a worker to work against their will through the use of physical violence, intimidation, confinement, or any other means that unjustly restricts that worker's mental or physical freedom.
...
Article 16: An employer must not form a contract that prescribes a monetary penalty for breach of a labor contract or establishes the amount of compensation for loss or damage in advance."
This explicitly applies to contract workers (契約社員) too, and protections for employees (正社員) are so strong that it can often take months of documentation to dismiss someone. Whether people know they have these protections, knew they had them before they sign something their company gives them or feel comfortable actually reporting when a company has violated them is a different story. But basic salary is protected strongly enough that most Japanese companies heavily weight compensation on annual/semi-annual bonuses, housing allowances etc... (which are not protected).
I think this is only a prohibition on liquidated damages clauses though (plus making the act of even writing a penalty clause, which are already unenforceable, unlawful).
It doesn't appear to be an exclusion of actual damages due to e.g. a one year contract worker quitting after 6 months, if it actually caused their employer damages.
> a company could actually sue the employee and win.
It's difficult and costs money to prove that someone is half-assing their job on purpose, and that cost a company a specific dollar amount of losses. It's why they may threaten to sue, but rarely do.
> Other Japan-labor-law fun fact: if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date. Hope you like that job you signed onto!
It's technically a contract violation, but there are many exceptions that allow you to quit within the first year, and that's assuming the company is totally above board legally (hint: if it's a black company, then they aren't.)
All this has gone a long way to make me feel better about not keeping up my Japanese language skills after university. My youthful deep reverence for Japan and its culture shifted into realpolitik as I learned more and more, and I think another watch of Fear And Trembling is in order…
I kinda want to go there and purchase a 10k house in a village and chill. It’s basically a place where you can retire. I know a bunch of white people who have already done this.
Just like how Japan isn’t characterized fully by anime it’s not fully characterized by corporate culture either.
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.
Sure, but unless you're going to stay forever you have more reason to care about costs wherever you came from. Might want to buy a house back there, or pay off student loans.
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.
I understand what you mean, and perhaps "a collection of hamlets" is a more accurate description.
In my experience, your perception depends heavily on your personal background. The city where I live (Misawa) hosts an American military base, and when talking with them nobody ever complaints about the urban sprawl, I guess it is normal for them.
However, I am from Spain, a country where even small villages are very compact (we prefer to build all the houses together, and keep the farms outside), so for me Japanese villages feel very sparse. Another big difference is that in Spain we value public areas (the third space), and here public spaces range between infrequent and not-existent.
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.
Constitution of Japan, Article 18, prohibition of forced labor. So "illegal" isn't the right word.
While damages are theoretically possible for leaving a fixed term employment contract early (with an exception after one year has passed), I'd be very interested in the precedent you're talking of, regarding an actual case of a contract employee being sued for quitting early.
Only case I found was the K's International case, 1992, where an employee quit after 4 days, and the employer sued and was awarded damages (amount unknown) due to the disruption it caused. I couldn't find any further details though.
I still remember the day of the explosion down the road from our office in Nagoya. The worker had been driven to such desperation and rage that he sealed himself off in the boss's office after dousing everything (including himself) in gasoline.
The cops were there, trying to talk him down, but the fumes had reached such a concentration that the next time the aircon kicked in, the place exploded.
The worker exploitation in Japan is BAD, and has been for decades. When you employ someone, you don't technically own them, but culturally you absolutely do.
The advert will perfectly select for the type of person they actually want: an obsessive crank who is already independently wealthy and posting about government waste on Twitter 24/7. I'm surprised they haven't offered catturd2 a cabinet post yet.
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.
Also, one might be forgiven for doubting him on that; unless he's counting 'painfully stupid tweets' as 'work', the sheer volume of them would call the _possibility_ of this into question.
Matt Levine covered what was an absolutte banger of a press release from JPMorgan
> JPMorgan Chase & Co. will limit junior banker hours to 80 per week in most cases, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Exceptions may include extra work to complete live deals, the person said.
My favorite part if the analysis was by far
> If there is nothing particularly urgent for you to do, it’s fine for you to come in at 9 a.m. and leave at midnight Monday through Friday and work just one afternoon per weekend, but obviously if you’re on a deal you’ll need to do more.
Aye - it’s similar across most high end tech work. At the same time, most people in those positions have 5+ years of experience. Most studies show that such people maintain a lie about how much they are working.
Oh, it's even worse than that. See that "DM this account with your CV" part? You currently need to pay for X Premium to send a DM to an account that does not follow you, meaning that you have to pay Elon for the privilege of applying to this job.
Shot is much more inaccurate of a description than assassinated, unless you want to ignore/downplay a sitting political leader getting murdered for political purposes.
If you're going to be this pedantic, I'll point out that specifying it was a shooting is both more accurate and, given the gun laws, more significant politically.
This may be the most absurd thing ive read on HN. To be clear, are you really suggesting someone breaking gun laws was more significant than the murder of the head of state?
I feel that some clarification is warranted, because the wording in your various replies can be misleading. Although the term "assassinated" is not invalid in this case, based on what you seem to imply, your arguments for why it should be preferred in this instance are moot. You might not be wrong, but maybe choose different arguments.
1. Abe was not in power at the time he was shot. He was giving a campaign speech in support of a running member of his party.
2. Abe was not specifically targeted for his political views or policies. He was a victim of convenience. That is, the real target was the Unification Church. An organization deeply entrenched in the Japanese political sphere and which the killer had a clear personal vendetta against. Abe was a visible public figure with ties to the UC. He was also more accessible to the shooter.
Abe's killing has been described as one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history due to the backlash against the UC that it provoked. The Economist remarked that "... Yamagami's political violence has proved stunningly effective ... Political violence seldom fulfils so many of its perpetrator's aims." Writing for The Atlantic, Robert F. Worth described Yamagami as "among the most successful assassins in history."
The success spoken of here has nothing to do with Abe or his policies. It's rather about the subsequent rise in public awareness and purge of UC's members from Japanese politics.
I'm not following the least bit. I said it's more accurate to say Abe was assassinated than simply "was shooted at", you say no and then proceed to use three sources which promptly talk about how Abe was assassinated. I presume we are talking of different things at this point.
Shot is much more inaccurate of a description than assassinated, unless you want to ignore/downplay a sitting political leader getting murdered for political purposes.
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?
Black companies certainly still exist and still mistreat their employees—I know quite a few people that work a lot of overtime with no extra pay, experience パワハラ, are the longest tenured employee around after just one year because of the massive turnover... Just because some people (you, the other people you mention) don't experience this doesn't mean nobody else does.
That is my experience too. In my neighborhood, by 8pm, the streets are crawling with drunk salarymen (and women) stumbling out of izakayas on their way to a snack and/or karaoke -- 5 days per week. They clearly werent working overtime with how often I see them.
the nomikai is part of the work, where the social status is being reinforced (pouring drinks while deeply bowing to the boss, getting forced to drink, the speeches, the clapping, etc)
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).
Where I'm from people call doing 10 hours a day and then being socially pressured into going to the bar with your boss afterwards to be overwork. You are welcome to call it whatever you want but going "yeah we do it that way here" doesn't make it any better. And, just to head off the usual response, what we do here also has its own issues. But I definitely will not be going "oh I saw a guy on the train at 3 PM clearly he is slacking at work".
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.
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.
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.
Well, it's true that most my my colleagues can read English well enough to get the gist of docs and Stack Overflow, but when it comes to speaking, they don't know how to pronounce a lot of the words, to the point of being very difficult for the listener to understand, and struggle to put together a coherent sentence (particularly in the short timeframe needed to have a smooth conversation). They also find speaking English to be highly stressful and generally avoid it as much as they can.
Not really in Japan. Everything is available in Japanese if it's not Japanese made in the first place. Complete lack of English skill + wide coverage of industry is probably a huge moat for Japan even in IT.
This is why you see plenty of Japanese (and Korean) expats across China and ASEAN. A mid-level Japanese employee can become a senior manager in Thailand or Vietnam while earning a similar salary to Japan ($20-40k).
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.
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.
> "He even received a personal letter from the evil president in his paycheck envelope saying: "you should reflect on your sales this month by killing yourself.""
This is illegal in some countries and will put one in jail.
this article was a bit annoying - several paragraphs of filler background, then a video from some movie - then a list of bad companies
... and then finally at the end you get told what exactly black companies are -list of common characteristics of black companies. Made for an irritating read
The term "black", etimologicaly speaking, is racist and should not be used. Japanese culture seems also to be racist, so not a surprise. Instead of "black companies", kindly use "evil companies" instead.
I don't think this is related to what I mentioned. I'm truly surprised that this subject is not relevant to you or, treated like if I was joking. I am just saying the term has indeed the connotation of "what is black is wrong". I failed in providing an article to corroborate with my position. I will try to find something.
> "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.
Sure, but the inexplicable bit is that there's no actual reason it has to be that way.
There's no reason why a law cannot be passed amending the tax code to make health insurance premiums paid by an individual tax deductible.
I'm not saying it would be easy to get such a law passed, but that doesn't change the fact that it's stupid to have health insurance tied to your employer.
(At any rate, health insurance premiums are tax deductible, but the rules are annoying and require that your healthcare spending be a certain percentage of your income.)
>The reason is explicable - health insurance paid by the employer is tax-deductible, while insurance paid by the employee is not.
It would be very easy to reverse, if literally anyone was willing to.
Hillary was for single payer. Trump ran on repealing even the ACA. I don't think it's as simple as literally anyone.
I'm not talking about changing the healthcare system entirely, but the tax deduction status.
Right, but we're currently at a point politically where we're heavily considering regressions in healthcare and insurance, not progressions. We're talking about bringing back denying coverage for existing conditions and allowing insurance to deny medication on grounds of religious reasons.
Changing the tax deduction status would harm businesses, and therefore I can't see a conservative administration ever letting that fly.
Which goes again to my original point.
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
I very much read it as I responded, and re-reading, still interpret it as such.
Kirkules is correct.
My apologies, I stand corrected.
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.
"Most people" are not dependent on health insurance for their average needs, except in the long-term or unexpectedly.
Then of course, being unemployed, you have the option of COBRA (you probably don't want that though), and if it does not make you immediately eligible for Medicaid in your state (40 of 50 have Medicaid expansion), it would make you eligible for the ACA subsidized plans. NB: more than one-third of employer-sponsored plans are HDHPs, meaning employees have deductibles in the thousands of dollars anyway.
It's certainly a disruption, and it's one more thing to consider, but the idea that "most Americans" are one job loss away from being killed by lack of health care is not remotely true - most people don't need health care that regularly, unemployed people have insurance options, and at a last resort, for the most part, you can accrue unlimited medical debt in most places with few real-world consequences.
My wife was once a day light on her birth control. Nine months later, she delivered a boy.
For most women of child bearing age, between birth control and annual visits, healthcare is pretty important.
Birth control is available over the counter in the US. If you have specific need, it’s very cheap and your doctor will almost always just call in refills without charging you. The meds themselves are not expensive.
Annual visits are also not actually that important. They’re perfunctory. They can certainly be put off for a few months in a ok except a few one in a million cases.
And at any rate, as I said, losing your job in the US means your insurance is disrupted, not that you are now uninsured. Pregnancy even in states without Medicaid expansion will get the mother and child on Medicaid.
Of course, at the risk of being silly, it’s also true that missing a day of birth control is not what got your wife pregnant. ;) it’s pretty surprising to me how many people (now with children) thought birth control meant they wouldn’t get pregnant. There definitely needs to be better education on this. Taking birth control, even regularly, even with an IUD, is more like a backstop and should not be relied on for your primary protection. The odds are low but when you play them a few times a week for ten years…
If you lose healthcare """insurance""" when you lose your job, you never had real insurance to start with.
(The system might work if some lag was introduced (a year of keeping that level of insurance??), but I'm not sure that this duration would not quickly get sapped by perverse incentives ?)
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.
Don’t most large employers essentially self insure? They only outsource the administration to insurance companies, not the float.
Sure. The point is that the employer does all the selecting of options and the patient/employer has to take what the employer chose. No market for the patient.
We left the free market of healthcare behind because it was awful for consumers. People who were disabled or otherwise had chronic conditions were, more or less, completely screwed. Not to mention these regulations are very much necessary. We want educated and highly certified doctors cutting you up.
Aren't healthcare costs in line with the very high US income levels (with people spending a high fraction of their income in it, because they can afford to), and the main issue is inequality (including lack of real insurance)?
COBRA is an expensive joke
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.
Poor people don't save because they are poor and there's nothing to save.
It costs loads more to be poor than to have some money. You won't save money by buying up-front, if your credit is low you'll pay more than a person with more money, you miss payments and the late fees rack up, you overdraft and your fees add up, you can't go on autopay to save money because you risk going into overdraft, etc.
Maybe if the 1% didn't own 50% off all the resources (money) than poor people could find some money to save.
I'm looking at the data and there is zero relationship between inflation, interest rates and personal savings in the USA. People save in time of crisis (2008, covid, etc.), and don't when the economy is good (1990 -> 2007)
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.
In what way is losing income from quitting different in at-will vs the article? Losing the income is a consequence, but it's the same consequence in both cases and so is not part of the conversation and silly to mention.
> In what way is losing income from quitting different in at-will vs the article?
This question isn’t relevant to the claim that I am responding to.
> Losing the income is a consequence, but it's the same consequence in both cases and so is not part of the conversation
You’re right that having no income is the same as having no income, and the manner in which it was lost does not matter. But the state of “having no income” does indeed matter. That statement is relevant to this conversation due to gp’s claim that losing income and health insurance are not “practical repercussions” of losing employment. That’s a naïveté that a stable society cannot abide.
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, I really haven’t. Please enlighten me.
(and remember to figure out a difference that applies to San Francisco and Boston and NYC and Austin but not Kansas City or New Orleans.)
Yes, naturally such a system is biased towards high accountability and high trust industries. Industries which thrive on minimal accountability and trust won't function very well. Personally, I think that's a good thing overall. The problem comes in when other countries don't operate this way, so those businesses can just go there (and take your talent with you, i.e. brain drain).
France is especially like that, with consequent mass unemployment. That's the model the progressive side of our politics wants to emulate.
> 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.
That and other reasons (few vacantion days, request to overtime, etc) is why one should avoid American companies in Europe, if possible.
Trust goes both ways.
> Most people can and if you can’t then the government pays for it.
For now.
> The relative ease with which most people can get another job is also nice.
This seems unemphathetic. Even just for the tech industry, thousands of engineers have found it difficult to find new work after the layoffs of the previous years. Please do not extrapolate your experience of the ease of finding new work towards every other American.
> It is an economy that is structured under the assumption that people will move between jobs and minimizes the friction in doing so.
No. Even if you look at it from a process perspective, true minimized friction is when other countries goverments automatically deduct and manage your taxes when you move jobs, manage retirement funds and have socialized healthcare to reduce the stress and uncertainty during unemployment. You claim that "at-will" minimizes friction is a joke compared to those.
[dead]
>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.
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.
The notice period is kinda odd. I've known people who want to leave immediately and haven't had a lot of trouble doing so because the relationship with their employer has soured that much.
Paid by the doctor? I think sick pay comes from the employer initially and later statutory sick pay(state).
You're right, the doctor thing is just bad grammar or sentence structure on my part
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.
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 ?
If there is bad blood leading up to the termination, then I guess so. I haven't witnessed that more than once or twice in my career.
Most people make an extra effort to end on a positive note, both with colleagues and managers. Of course, effectively off-boarding yourself means having progressively less and less to do as time goes by... So in that sense you sort of quiet quit.
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.
I don’t know statistics but here in Germany many people have insurance that pays for attorneys in case of conflicts related to employment and would make use of 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 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.
It can be a totally different experience if you have a chronic illness that affects your schedule, or if you don't have a car. In my case it's been both. Currently, lack of reliable transportation and a driver's license is the main issue.
I've been struggling to even get an interview in junior software dev for over a year now. Tried some help desk as well and never heard back. I've had my resume looked at quite a few times now, so I doubt that that's the problem.
If you go to r/jobs and related subreddits, there are plenty of people who are losing their minds after applying to thousands of jobs for the last 2 years without even getting a prescreen. Some are even being rejected by temp agencies. I assume that this is an anomaly and 2023-24 had a uniquely terrible job market.
I'm going to a job fair soon. Wish me luck.
> if you don't have a car.
I had a long gap between employers where I lived off of saved money and explored new tech with a hope that I'd be able to improve my standing in the market. It made it nearly impossible to get anyone interested in my application because the gap was years.
Once I'd finally changed that by working a temp gig (having now achieved recent employment), I started getting calls. The job I took required visiting clients on-site from time to time. They didn't think to ask me if I had a car or license. When they found out (as I took a company-paid Uber 25m in my second month), I sensed that they realized they'd left a huge gap in their interview process. I was reassigned to only visit clients that I could get to via a combination of train and ride-share or short ride-share.
Had they asked about long-distance on-sites and my ability to get there myself, I'm confident I wouldn't have been hired.
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?
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).
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!
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.
Long ones can be a deal breaker though. It was for me when I was looking for a new job before. It's similar to being willing to relocate imo.
Three months is definitely very much on the high side.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
This is wrong.
A 1-year employment contract in the EU will still have a notice period, probably 2-4 weeks. (Probably 1 month for a 2-year contract.)
What happens if you break it with zero days notice?
Not even close. Being from the US, I've worked both in Japan and Europe. Nothing holds a candle to how bad Japan is. It's unbelievable.
> 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.
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?
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.
> If an employee, for example, decides to put in notice and then half-ass their job until their departure date, a company could actually sue the employee and win.
That sounds rather exaggerated. There may have been cases of an employee being sued for damages by their a employer for not performing their jobs well, but I've personally never heard of them and without digging deep into courts records, I doubt there are many of these.
The reason I highly doubt that, is that even just firing employees in Japan who are half-assing their job requires going to court and providing ample evidence that the employee has been continuously under-performing even though they were notified, given opportunity and failed to improve.
This standard is considered so high, that Japanese companies rarely fire employees for this type of reason (Ordinary termination 普通解雇 futsuu kaiko). When companies absolutely want to get rid of a certain employee, they often prefer to slowly make the employee's life miserable by giving them them demeaning tasks (or in some cases just no tasks at all!), bullying them and cutting their pay — a practice generally called iyagarase (roughly translated as "making someone feeling unpleasant"). That kind of play can also land the employer in legal trouble, but at least the burden of proof would fall on the employee. In many other cases still, companies just keep around employees that are under performing or convince them to take an voluntary retirement package.
In addition to all of that, employment contracts generally require a 30 day notice before quitting in Japan (I guess this is the maximum set by law). Combine that with the fact that most employees tend to have at least 14 days of unused leave accumulated, which they'd use just before leaving, they're not left with so enough working days in which they can half-ass their jobs.
I'm not quite sure about breaking your contract for contract employees, but it the original example ("I'll be threatened that I will have to pay damages for quitting") doesn't seem like a contract employee, and the term "black companies" and the discourse around usually refers to full-time employment. It's probably just threats, as the quote says. Managers sometimes say the craziest things to scare their companies out of quitting.
> If an employee, for example, decides to put in notice and then half-ass their job until their departure date,
Suppose you are fired, and the company decides unilaterally to halve your salary during the notice period, wouldn't you get nasty about it?
> if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date
As long as it is illegal for the company to fire you as well, I don't see any problem. Why should a party of a contract be free to breach it at will while the other remains constrained?
> I don't see any problem. Why should a party of a contract be free to breach it at will while the other remains constrained?
Companies are run to make money, while people usually enter employment contracts in order to have money to feed their families and survive. Humans usually come to the consensus that people are more important than profits.
A company doesn't need to be doing anything illegal for the working conditions to be unsafe. I am still boycotting Paris Baguette and their sister companies because of their stubbornness and refusal to go beyond the legal minimums in safety equipment.
2 years ago a 23-year old employee got pulled into a sauce making machine and was crushed to death, with nobody finding her body until the next day. Let's say you are a bright 22-year old from the Philippines who got offered 3x your peers salary for working at an industrial bakery. It doesn't sound so bad right? Now let's say your friend got killed by machinery, and the company refuses to take responsibility because the safety equipment that could have prevented their death was optional and not legally required. You're 4 months into your 12-month contract. Do you have enough money to even get a flight back home? Do you have enough money to break your contract and pay the company for your flight from your home country, pay the company for breaking your subsidized lease in the dorms, etc? No you don't. That is a bad situation to be in. If it were me I would break the contract and just never come back to Korea. They're not going to extradite you for this debt, but does everyone know that? Especially migrant workers?
Now I know this is about Japan and not Korea. Look into how many Vietnamese go work in the textile industry in Japan and get injured. Should there really be more barriers and intimidation when it comes to forcing the workers to stay for the duration of their contract when their roommate was crippled by the machinery? Or should it be easier for people to leave potentially dangerous situations?
---
This also applies to white collar workers. Do you know how many Indian college students are lured to go work at a Japanese company with the promise of a high salary, only to then move to Tokyo and realize they're spending way more money than they expected due to the higher COL? Companies absolutely take advantage of this system. In the US companies usually only offer contracts to highly skilled workers, while in other countries companies offer contracts in order to trap individuals into poor working conditions and being underpaid when they're naive to the job market.
My point is that constraints must be equally strong on both sides.
If you want to be free to leave, just accept that the company is free to let you go. That's all!
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).
I think this is only a prohibition on liquidated damages clauses though (plus making the act of even writing a penalty clause, which are already unenforceable, unlawful).
It doesn't appear to be an exclusion of actual damages due to e.g. a one year contract worker quitting after 6 months, if it actually caused their employer damages.
> a company could actually sue the employee and win.
It's difficult and costs money to prove that someone is half-assing their job on purpose, and that cost a company a specific dollar amount of losses. It's why they may threaten to sue, but rarely do.
> Other Japan-labor-law fun fact: if you are a contract worker, it is literally illegal for you to quit prior to your contract expiry date. Hope you like that job you signed onto!
It's technically a contract violation, but there are many exceptions that allow you to quit within the first year, and that's assuming the company is totally above board legally (hint: if it's a black company, then they aren't.)
All this has gone a long way to make me feel better about not keeping up my Japanese language skills after university. My youthful deep reverence for Japan and its culture shifted into realpolitik as I learned more and more, and I think another watch of Fear And Trembling is in order…
I kinda want to go there and purchase a 10k house in a village and chill. It’s basically a place where you can retire. I know a bunch of white people who have already done this.
Just like how Japan isn’t characterized fully by anime it’s not fully characterized by corporate culture either.
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.
Sure, but unless you're going to stay forever you have more reason to care about costs wherever you came from. Might want to buy a house back there, or pay off student loans.
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.
I understand what you mean, and perhaps "a collection of hamlets" is a more accurate description.
In my experience, your perception depends heavily on your personal background. The city where I live (Misawa) hosts an American military base, and when talking with them nobody ever complaints about the urban sprawl, I guess it is normal for them.
However, I am from Spain, a country where even small villages are very compact (we prefer to build all the houses together, and keep the farms outside), so for me Japanese villages feel very sparse. Another big difference is that in Spain we value public areas (the third space), and here public spaces range between infrequent and not-existent.
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.
Constitution of Japan, Article 18, prohibition of forced labor. So "illegal" isn't the right word.
While damages are theoretically possible for leaving a fixed term employment contract early (with an exception after one year has passed), I'd be very interested in the precedent you're talking of, regarding an actual case of a contract employee being sued for quitting early.
Only case I found was the K's International case, 1992, where an employee quit after 4 days, and the employer sued and was awarded damages (amount unknown) due to the disruption it caused. I couldn't find any further details though.
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:
The advert will perfectly select for the type of person they actually want: an obsessive crank who is already independently wealthy and posting about government waste on Twitter 24/7. I'm surprised they haven't offered catturd2 a cabinet post yet.
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.
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.
Also, one might be forgiven for doubting him on that; unless he's counting 'painfully stupid tweets' as 'work', the sheer volume of them would call the _possibility_ of this into question.
I think you wouldn't be forgiven if you don't cast doubt.
The guy runs 6 independent companies (at least their stock is!). There aren't 6*80 hours in a week.
You have worked for Musk?
Don't need to, he literally demands that in his tweet.
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.
Matt Levine covered what was an absolutte banger of a press release from JPMorgan
> JPMorgan Chase & Co. will limit junior banker hours to 80 per week in most cases, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Exceptions may include extra work to complete live deals, the person said.
My favorite part if the analysis was by far
> If there is nothing particularly urgent for you to do, it’s fine for you to come in at 9 a.m. and leave at midnight Monday through Friday and work just one afternoon per weekend, but obviously if you’re on a deal you’ll need to do more.
https://archive.ph/2DI49
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.
> mostly a lie for folks experienced enough to have families
Surviving to that level is HARD. Most Junior Analysts in the IB and Consulting World flame out and exit the industry within 2-3 years.
Aye - it’s similar across most high end tech work. At the same time, most people in those positions have 5+ years of experience. Most studies show that such people maintain a lie about how much they are working.
> most high end tech work
It isn't. New Grad SWEs work at most 50 hours a week and VPs tend to work around 50-60 hours a week tops.
IB and Consulting have notoriously horrid work cultures because there are few roles but plenty of demand.
Oh, it's even worse than that. See that "DM this account with your CV" part? You currently need to pay for X Premium to send a DM to an account that does not follow you, meaning that you have to pay Elon for the privilege of applying to this job.
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.
1. Wasn’t the sitting leader 2. Assassination is predicated on politics/religion/“impetus greater than oneself.” The murder in this case was personal
Shot is much more inaccurate of a description than assassinated, unless you want to ignore/downplay a sitting political leader getting murdered for political purposes.
If you're going to be this pedantic, I'll point out that specifying it was a shooting is both more accurate and, given the gun laws, more significant politically.
This may be the most absurd thing ive read on HN. To be clear, are you really suggesting someone breaking gun laws was more significant than the murder of the head of state?
I feel that some clarification is warranted, because the wording in your various replies can be misleading. Although the term "assassinated" is not invalid in this case, based on what you seem to imply, your arguments for why it should be preferred in this instance are moot. You might not be wrong, but maybe choose different arguments.
1. Abe was not in power at the time he was shot. He was giving a campaign speech in support of a running member of his party.
2. Abe was not specifically targeted for his political views or policies. He was a victim of convenience. That is, the real target was the Unification Church. An organization deeply entrenched in the Japanese political sphere and which the killer had a clear personal vendetta against. Abe was a visible public figure with ties to the UC. He was also more accessible to the shooter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Shinzo_Abe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetsuya_Yamagami
From the first link:
Abe's killing has been described as one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history due to the backlash against the UC that it provoked. The Economist remarked that "... Yamagami's political violence has proved stunningly effective ... Political violence seldom fulfils so many of its perpetrator's aims." Writing for The Atlantic, Robert F. Worth described Yamagami as "among the most successful assassins in history."
The success spoken of here has nothing to do with Abe or his policies. It's rather about the subsequent rise in public awareness and purge of UC's members from Japanese politics.
This is the exact reason I wrote "shot" instead of "assassinated".
I'm not following the least bit. I said it's more accurate to say Abe was assassinated than simply "was shooted at", you say no and then proceed to use three sources which promptly talk about how Abe was assassinated. I presume we are talking of different things at this point.
You are not replying in good faith. Have a nice day.
Assassinated via getting shot, yes.
Shot is much more inaccurate of a description than assassinated, unless you want to ignore/downplay a sitting political leader getting murdered for political purposes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Shinzo_Abe
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
Black companies certainly still exist and still mistreat their employees—I know quite a few people that work a lot of overtime with no extra pay, experience パワハラ, are the longest tenured employee around after just one year because of the massive turnover... Just because some people (you, the other people you mention) don't experience this doesn't mean nobody else does.
That is my experience too. In my neighborhood, by 8pm, the streets are crawling with drunk salarymen (and women) stumbling out of izakayas on their way to a snack and/or karaoke -- 5 days per week. They clearly werent working overtime with how often I see them.
the nomikai is part of the work, where the social status is being reinforced (pouring drinks while deeply bowing to the boss, getting forced to drink, the speeches, the clapping, etc)
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.
Where I'm from people call doing 10 hours a day and then being socially pressured into going to the bar with your boss afterwards to be overwork. You are welcome to call it whatever you want but going "yeah we do it that way here" doesn't make it any better. And, just to head off the usual response, what we do here also has its own issues. But I definitely will not be going "oh I saw a guy on the train at 3 PM clearly he is slacking at work".
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.
Needs a (2014). This was from almost a decade ago.
*over (somehow)
> (2014)... almost a decade ago.
Oh bummer
I cannot quite believe it but it checks out
Done.
> the Labor Ministry began a crackdown on black companies, too
"We will definitely discuss the formation a task force to examine the ramifications of potentially instituting regulations in the future"
“Black Corporations” Still Common in Japan
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01840/
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...
> 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...
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.
Well, it's true that most my my colleagues can read English well enough to get the gist of docs and Stack Overflow, but when it comes to speaking, they don't know how to pronounce a lot of the words, to the point of being very difficult for the listener to understand, and struggle to put together a coherent sentence (particularly in the short timeframe needed to have a smooth conversation). They also find speaking English to be highly stressful and generally avoid it as much as they can.
Not really in Japan. Everything is available in Japanese if it's not Japanese made in the first place. Complete lack of English skill + wide coverage of industry is probably a huge moat for Japan even in IT.
Not really, no. Being able to read it is harder to avoid, but usefully communicating in it is not needed in many places.
> Why don't they just emigrate
This is why you see plenty of Japanese (and Korean) expats across China and ASEAN. A mid-level Japanese employee can become a senior manager in Thailand or Vietnam while earning a similar salary to Japan ($20-40k).
A follow-up analysis 10 years later would be really interesting
Sounds like every ‘normal’ job in Shenzhen, China
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.
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.
> "He even received a personal letter from the evil president in his paycheck envelope saying: "you should reflect on your sales this month by killing yourself.""
This is illegal in some countries and will put one in jail.
this article was a bit annoying - several paragraphs of filler background, then a video from some movie - then a list of bad companies
... and then finally at the end you get told what exactly black companies are -list of common characteristics of black companies. Made for an irritating read
Anti-communism at it's best.
The term "black", etimologicaly speaking, is racist and should not be used. Japanese culture seems also to be racist, so not a surprise. Instead of "black companies", kindly use "evil companies" instead.
I suppose that's also why Japanese martial artists work their way toward a black belt.
I don't think this is related to what I mentioned. I'm truly surprised that this subject is not relevant to you or, treated like if I was joking. I am just saying the term has indeed the connotation of "what is black is wrong". I failed in providing an article to corroborate with my position. I will try to find something.
Black used in a bad context = THATS RACIST
Black used in a good context = THATS UNRELATED
you would think at some point cognitive dissonance would kick in but virtue signaling and victim complex high is just too addictive and rewarding
let's rename Niger and Nigeria while we're at it. goddamn racists