• by Suvendrini Kakuchi (tokyo)
• Friday, July 23, 2010
• Inter Press Service

The Japanese government may have revised the country’s laws in response to complaints that its system of hiring foreign trainees at lower wages is exploitative, but calls remain for the latter to be scrapped altogether.

Labour lawyers and rights groups working with foreign trainees, almost all of them from Asian countries who arrive in Japan with a three-year visa, say the programme is simply not working.

'The system is riddled with problems,' says Lila Abiko, an attorney at the Lawyers Network for Trainees. The programme, she adds, 'is a smokescreen for providing cheap foreign labour to Japanese companies that has absolute no respect for the rights of the workers'.

This is because the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law allows them to work for specified periods as trainees, a status that means they are not recognised as migrant workers in a labour market that the country has officially kept largely closed.

Abiko's network is appearing for foreign trainees who have filed 25 lawsuits against their Japanese bosses because of unpaid wages, injuries at work, and arbitrary lay-offs.

Hailed by the government as a source of technology exchange with developing nations, Japan’s foreign internship programme was set up 20 years ago and has since attracted thousands of young trainees, mostly from nearby countries. They are usually placed in small and medium-sized firms engaged in food packaging, electrical machinery, metalwork, and agriculture.

Last year, Japan hosted 50,064 foreign trainees. Of these, nearly 41,000 came from China, followed by Vietnam at 2,677, and 2,661 from the Philippines. More than 60 percent of the trainees were female, and almost 70 percent were in their 20s.

But many trainees say that they are not only made to do tasks they had not signed up for but are paid a pittance despite their long work hours.

Li Qingzhi, a 35-year-old Chinese trainee, is now suing the furniture-making company that took him in, seeking overtime pay that he says is still due him. 'I was recruited in China where the employment agency promised me I could learn Japanese cooking, which was my wish and reason for applying,' he says through an interpreter.

But after arriving in Japan in 2008, Li says he was placed in the furniture factory where he was forced to clean garbage and cut grass on the mountains to clear it for bamboo cultivation. And this was after he had paid almost 8,500 U.S. dollars to a local agent.

Li was also promised 70,000 yen (670 dollars) a month once he began his second year at the company. His overtime pay, however, was calculated at 200 yen or 1.8 dollars per hour, far below the legal minimum overtime pay of 7.8 dollars per hour.

Recounts Li, who eventually ran away: 'Far from learning new technology, my life was a nightmare, working long hours daily with no vacation and little sleep.'

Ichiro Takahara, head of the trade union Network Fukui in western Japan, meanwhile says that his group handles around 300 labour-related cases a month involving female foreign interns at the textile factories in that area.

'The women seek our advice (about) their bosses who have not paid their overtime or refuse to give them holidays,' he says. 'The agency that brought the trainees takes no responsibility.'

Takahara says the interns, who are mostly Chinese, speak little Japanese. He adds that their generally meek nature and willingness to work long hours make them all the more vulnerable to exploitation.

Data collected by Network Fukui indicate that each foreign trainee in the textile factories averages 100 hours of overtime a month. But given the recession, says Takahara, management is constantly trying to avoid paying for overtime -- one of the contentious points in the trainee programme.

The Japan International Training Cooperation Organisation (JITCO), a state agency that oversees the foreign trainee programme, acknowledges that the programme has flaws. But it says this is precisely why the government on Jul. 1 revised the law that covers it.

'We have tightened the loopholes by including penalties and also paying the trainees when they work,' says JITCO official Takashi Nakamura.

These penalties will be meted on companies and sending agencies that 'abuse' trainees. Yet another revision is the change in the interns’ status in the first year from trainee to full-fledged worker. This gives them the protection of the Japanese Labour Standards Law and the Minimum Wage Law for his or her entire three years in the country.

Earlier, such a status was accorded to foreign interns only during their last two years in Japan.

Gentoitsu Workers Union spokesman Hiroshi Nakajima concedes that the law’s revisions are important, but still fall short of protecting foreign workers’ rights.

Nakajima says a trainee’s right to change companies or negotiate for different training programmes remains unavailable. He observes, 'The basic attitude that treats the foreign trainee as a person who can be exploited has not changed, unless we see the government willing to treat him or her as a person who has rights.'

It may be time for Japan to finally admit that it needs foreign workers to keep its industries humming and put a transparent system for migrant labour in place, says lawyer Abiko.

'Labelling various employment programmes under fancy names such as technology exchange is hiding the reality,' she says. 'It is important to face the fact that Japan cannot survive without foreign workers who can work as factory hands or in agriculture, which is where they are most needed.'

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

Where next?

Advertisement