Unbearable hours, threats of being fired: The abuse of migrant interns in Japan
83 points by tropicalfruit 1 year ago | 62 comments- hollywood_court 1 year agoI saw this kind of behavior when I worked for a Korean company here in the US.
They treated us like animals. I thought I had seen the worst working conditions possible during my time in Haiti.
But the two years I spent working for the Koreans showed me that I lacked a great deal of perspective regarding just how poorly employees can be treated.
And they treated their visiting interns even worse. Students would fly in from Korea and rotate in/out every six months. Those kids were put through the wringer.
- chaostheory 1 year agoOne of my good friends is South Korean. When he worked for Samsung in Seoul as an engineer over a decade ago, he was forced to live in Samsung dormitories which were overseen by their managers. Apparently, it was a shock even for him to realize that he had to ask his manager just to go out on a date. If I remember correctly, he even had to give details of his female date to his manager. (It may or may not be official policy, but what are you going to do when they ask and you need permission to leave?)
Knowing what life was like here since he went to undergrad here, it was an easy choice for him to come back to the US.
- alephnerd 1 year agoLots of Koreans move to Vietnam and Thailand for that reason. The pay is low in SK and the work culture horrid, so if your choice is earning $30-50k in Seoul or $20-40k in BKK or Saigon, plenty of people choose the latter.
- alephnerd 1 year ago
- orwin 1 year agoAnd tbh, Korean work culture seems to be horrible for overall productivity. Disclaimer: my only second hand knowledge are a Norwegian oil rig engineer and a French sailor (working on oil rigs. Weird, I know, one is extended family, second is happenstance).
But from what I've heard, they have trouble adapting to new data (they _can_ do it in real emergency, but actively avoid taking initiative), hide issues and overall are very rigid and show almost no improvisation skills, all of which is a problem in high stress, fast-changing environment like oil rigs.
- StefanBatory 1 year agoWhenever Korean factories opened in Poland, that was the same conclusion. Workers were treated like shit.
- alephnerd 1 year agoSadly, it's a common issue with recently developed country work culture.
For example, TSMC is facing similar hurdles trying to expand semicon manufacturing in the US [0].
Even though SK, JP, TW, and Israel are all developed countries now, the developing country mentality still persists because their transition was relatively recent (a generation or less ago), and a lot of labor management and regulations is stuck in the old school era.
At least in the EU, the recently developed (eg. Czechia) and developing countries (eg. Bulgaria) still have some labor frameworks to kinda follow and some kind of recourse - at least for white collar work.
- meindnoch 1 year agoCzechia is recently developed? :DDDD
- meindnoch 1 year ago
- hollywood_court 1 year agoThese types of companies are fleeing to the Southern US because the conservative governments here offer no protections for the employees.
- macbook_amateur 1 year agoI remember a Korean car factory in Alabama got caught using child labor a couple years back: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
- macbook_amateur 1 year ago
- alephnerd 1 year ago
- silverquiet 1 year agoWhat specifically did they do? I can say that I've been treated very badly by Private Equity and other employers myself, but it's easy to lack perspective and I don't really feel like trying to enter a victim contest. Hopefully I've learned enough to avoid that kind of employment in future.
- alephnerd 1 year agoIn IB/PE we have exit opps like VC or PM, and there is a reckoning in IB/PE leadership that the old school 60-100 hour analyst work culture is toxic.
In Korean companies, the work culture is still stuck in the 90s era IB mentality, as a lot of management are much older and started their careers when chauvanism, racism, functional alcoholism, power politics, overwork, etc was still the norm.
Tbf, SK was still a developing country until 10-15ish years ago.
- hollywood_court 1 year agoI didn't realize that South Korean was so behind the times until I read "Human Acts" by Han Kang. That book led me to perform quite a bit of research and further reading on Korea.
- silverquiet 1 year agoI'm assuming IB = investment banking, PE = private equity, VC = venture capital, and PM = public market. To be clear, I did not work for a private equity firm itself (I do not posses the psychopathic ambition required to do so), but for a company that ended up owned by a firm; that was the terrible experience.
- hollywood_court 1 year ago
- hollywood_court 1 year agoFor us regular US employees it was 6 days a week 12 hours per day. If you were more than 90 seconds late clocking in you were written up. 3 write ups and you're gone. 30 minute unpaid lunch break, but you weren't allowed to leave the site. To be honest, the strict stuff like that wasn't applicable to me because I was the only one there who could run the 5 axis CNC machines and edit the code. Everyone else was disposable.
One of the most memorable examples of not being treated like a human was when a coworker of mine wished to take one hour off in order to see his daughter graduate from high school. He had 4 kids at one time. But he lost one to cancer and two others to gang violence. He put in a time off request more than 5 months in advance so he could see his only remaining child graduate.
They denied his request. On the day of the graduation he clocked out and went to the graduation. He was gone maybe 35 minutes total. He saw his daughter walk across the stage and then he returned to work. They were waiting for him at the time clock and fired him.
When it comes to the interns, I saw a lot of yelling, grabbing by the arms while admonishing, and making them work without meals. All of the full time Korean employees had their lunch catered every day. The interns weren't allowed to eat with the full time employees and they weren't allowed to take any kind of meal breaks at all as for as I know.
I'm sure there was much more that went on behind closed doors, but seeing grown men grab 19 year old girls by their arms and shake them while yelling at them was pretty enlightening.
- silverquiet 1 year agoThank you for the additional color. I will say that aside from the physical stuff, this doesn't sound all that different from the treatment that workers for Amazon or a call center would be subject to. I had my own wage-slave days and navigating this type of employment was an incredibly demoralizing way to start a working life. I certainly don't take for granted the cushy role that I have at a software company now, in spite of the fact that I work for a small company at a salary many here would find insulting.
- idunnoman1222 1 year agoWhat’s really appalling is the lack of solidarity.
- natsucks 1 year agoterrible.
- dh2022 1 year agoCan you name and shame the company? And the city / state where this took place?
- silverquiet 1 year ago
- alephnerd 1 year ago
- chaostheory 1 year ago
- i5heu 1 year agoNot so funny for Japan considering that immigration is the only way they can handle their rapidly aging population.
I hope they can get their decade old humanoid robot research fast enough to production, otherwise i really don't see how they can provide for their population while having to care for 35% to 40% of the population that is over 64.
And since it does not look like it, the realization that migrants are not sub humans and actually quite value will hit hard.
- sanitycheck 1 year agoOne thing they can do is incentivise women to rejoin the workforce after having kids, another is raise the retirement age to 70+. I think we'll see both in the next 5-10 years. Maybe they can kill two birds with one stone and have OAPs work as childcare providers.
On the topic of this "intern" scheme, I've seen a couple of NHK documentaries on it in the past year or two so it's definitely in the public consciousness now - although I get the impression the response it's got hasn't matched the outrage I would have hoped for. From what I saw a "technical intern" is another name for a farm/factory labourer, which is almost beyond parody.
In February the "technical intern" program was abolished and a new system set up in its place. I'm doubtful it will be much better, but I guess we'll find out eventually.
- alephnerd 1 year ago> is incentivise women to rejoin the workforce after having kids
They already did that - it was a core plank of Abenomics.
> raise the retirement age to 70+
Highly unlikely. It would be politically untenable and the LDP is dependent on a coalition with Komeito, which is heavily in favor of the welfare state.
> I'm doubtful it will be much better, but I guess we'll find out eventually
It won't get better. Same abuse but with a different name.
- alephnerd 1 year ago
- Workaccount2 1 year agoI honestly think one of Americas greatest strengths is the ability to move here from where ever and be able to join society with relatively low friction.
People go on and on about racism in America, but I have generally found that those people have absolutely no fucking idea what racism in a society actually looks like. You wanna see racism? Go be a minority in any country with a 90% majority race/culture.
Edit: Invariably people need to confuse "Racism is a bigger issue in other countries than the US" with "Racism never existed in the US".
- walthamstow 1 year agoRacism in the US is less to do with the people who moved there and more to do with the people who were taken there.
The USA was an apartheid country in the Jim Crow era. What could be more racist than segregation?
Jim Crow apartheid was so deeply pervasive that WW2 soldiers blood transfusion packets were segregated, so a stricken white soldier wouldn't be tarnished with black blood. That's quite something when you're fighting against the Nazis.
- Workaccount2 1 year agoYes, America was extremely racist.
But contemporary examples, especially against immigrants, contrasted against immigrants to mono cultural countries, would be much more relevant to the point I am making.
- Workaccount2 1 year ago
- giraffe_lady 1 year agoI don't think that's cause to dismiss the very real experiences of racism that people do have in the US. Racism kills people here too.
- silverquiet 1 year agoWhen my dad was a kid, black Americans couldn't use the same water fountain as whites; it's not exactly ancient history. My grandparents wouldn't share rooms with black people at their nursing homes, and I'm talking about a couple years ago. It didn't all end because LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. At some point I think it might have been better when it was all out in the open, so at least you knew what was going on.
- throwaway743 1 year agoStories of discrimination would come up quite a bit about my father (black).
One time, he and my mother (white) were apartment hunting and this one landlord was excited to show them, when speaking over the phone. Once they showed up to check it out, that asshole slammed the door in their faces.
Discrimination persists through all aspects of life, employment, housing, etc. It's pathetic, really.
- throwaway743 1 year ago
- alephnerd 1 year agoI literally got into an argument with a couple Germans on HN about this earlier today.
- throwaway743 1 year ago> I honestly think one of Americas greatest strengths is the ability to move here from where ever and be able to join society with relatively low friction.
It really depends on where you move to and where youre from.
Also, let's not sweep discrimination under the rug. It's ugly and wrong all around. Some places worse than others, but it's still bullshit and shouldn't be tolerated, especially when it comes to employment.
- walthamstow 1 year ago
- maxglute 1 year ago>only way they can handle their rapidly aging population
There's always the unspoken option, which is to not handle geriatric care well at all. Old people have been dying neglected and alone in JP for a while. When shit critically hits the fan, geriatric population will be either too senile to vote, or if they can vote, too weak to protest, and thus can be easily ignored as a bloc. Goal of cycling through disposable migrants to do shit jobs locals don't want to do is to keep value positive sectors crunching. IMO different dynamic when it's coming out of pockets of already squeezed tax base to take care of boomers. There'sgoing to be a lot of, you lived a long life, so sad, too bad, because good luck convincing ethnocentric youth to take another L for the team by treating migrants better, the only social prestige pressed these days is knowing outsiders have it worse. Societies have no problem finding a way to be callous to poor, kids, women, minorities etc, they'll find a way to rationalize being incredibly callous to elders.
- alephnerd 1 year ago> which is to not handle geriatric care well at all
There is a recent Japanese Sci-Fi movie that came out at Cannes recently called Plan 75 [0] that touches on that option
Ofc, Japan is a democracy and old people vote.
Even if the LDP ruled for much of Japan's democratic history, it's still vulnerable to losing power due to public anger (eg. Kishida's corruption scandal).
Imagine how angrier Japanese voters would be with horrible geriatric care.
- maxglute 1 year agoI went to viewing of this during TIFF last year. But unfortunately ZZZ through most of it, no fault of the film which I enjoyed for the parts I was up.
>Japan is a democracy and old people vote
I think when non-working gerontocratic voting block interests confronts with interests of tax paying workforce trying to keep head above water, the elderly are going to lose. When under 50 year olds have to decide between their reduction in their QoL / services vs neglecting the old, including their own kin, they're going to eventually chose to throw their kin under the bus. If problem is just structurally not resolvable (which IMO it's not), LDP will claw their way back from whoever the next DPJ upstart is after they fail. Which is to say, I can imagine JP getting some robots going, and some migrant worker for elderly care, but if neither is enough, I think more likely politics will over promise and underdeliver until elderly accept their lot because you can only push the young so much. It's going to take a few political cycles for people to accept the "normal", but if any "democracy" can rig the system to survive that process, it's LDP/Japan.
- maxglute 1 year ago
- alephnerd 1 year ago
- downrightmike 1 year agoDead body cleanup is going to be a booming career
- kstenerud 1 year ago> I hope they can get their decade old humanoid robot research fast enough to production, otherwise i really don't see how they can provide for their population while having to care for 35% to 40% of the population that is over 64.
Aaaaaaand cue Roujin Z
- sanitycheck 1 year ago
- alephnerd 1 year agoAn indie Japanese-Vietnamese movie recently came out called "Along the Sea" giving a slice of life view of this [0]
I recommend watching it sometime.
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qU2xaRBeFiU&embeds_referring_e...
- savolai 1 year agoOn the general theme, I loved the book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Trembling_(film)?wpro...
- rbanffy 1 year ago[flagged]
- alephnerd 1 year agoDon't be facetious. It's nowhere near as bad as the Trainee program in Japan.
Unpaid wages, sexual harassment, unsafe working conditions, and physical violence are common occurrences in the Japanese (and Korean and Taiwanese) Trainee programs, which is used to operate a Gulf style migrant worker system.
And unlike the US, legal support for migrant workers is EXTREMELY hard to to come by, as almost all services are in Japanese and legal frameworks that can protect migrants like the Civil Rights Act don't exist.
My SO is Vietnamese and has extended family who have migrated to Japan and SK under the program and it is truly horrific, but it's better than starving in Gia Lai.
- rbanffy 1 year agoIt's similar, though less severe.
> as almost all services are in Japanese
You can't expect to move to a country and fend for yourself if you don't know the language. Someone who doesn't understand neither English nor Spanish will have a hard time in the US.
> and legal frameworks that can protect migrants like the Civil Rights Act don't exist.
That lack of a comprehensive legal framework to protect workers is the core of the issues immigrant labor faces. While I can't say I have seen the most horrifying behaviours described in the article, I've seen more than my fair share of Indian colleagues in the US being overworked/underpaid, suffering borderline racist abuse, and stressed for being kept in fear of losing their jobs and the ability to stay in the country.
Again, it's not as serious, but it's disingenuous to ignore it.
- rbanffy 1 year ago
- alephnerd 1 year ago