New data on the foreign worker training program shows that
it is so bad many workers don’t even complete their terms. The program started as a way to recruit foreign workers for the 3K jobs (dirty, dangerous, and under terrible conditions) most Japanese don’t want to do. The benefits the Japanese government touted were that these jobs would be filled and these workers would take back technological skills to their own countries. The key part of that is actually not the feeling of noblesse oblige, of First World Japan doing its part for the dumpy nations of Asia, but the part where the foreigners go home.
The Japanese government poured money into this program, not just the recruitment part or matching of potential employees with employers, but they subsidize the pitiful wage. All for what? I don’t want foreigners to be exploited on any level, but using my taxes to do it? Shameful.
So why don’t employees want to stay? Isn’t this just like a college study-abroad term?
No way. I’ve known about 6 people who worked in Japan as foreign trainees, and the term “trainee” is a misnomer. Training is usually limited to Japanese conversation, usually provided free by female university students. Otherwise these trainees are supposed to show up at their manufacturing or garbage-picking job (sorry, recycling technology)and just do their jobs. They stay in rooms provided by the company with other trainees. I have never known a Japanese person to have a roommate in this country, it’s just not done, but they force roommates (and in tiny Japanese apartments) on their trainees. My trainee acquaintances complain of the same thing other foreigners do; since they won’t be staying long none of the Japanese employees tries to get to know them. Then there are the working conditions; long hours, peer pressure to do overtime without recording it, no days off, no sick time. Basically it is the sad plight of most Japanese blue-collar workers but with two big differences; there is no hope you will one day become manager if you keep your head down, and the salary is vastly lower than the measly one given to the Japanese in the same positions. That’s right, even though the Japanese government subsidizes the wages, they can’t even be bothered with minimum wage which does not apply to trainees (Japanese or not).
My first few years in a Japanese company were hell. The problem with coming from another country to Japan is that you know how productive people can be, and you know how workers should be treated. Japanese workers are neither respected nor productive, but they don’t know anything else. If I hadn’t been given a living wage, I would not have stayed. There is no incentive for foreign trainees, primarily from countries with lower costs of living than Japan, to go into debt to come to Japan to be exploited.
This system has to change. There have to be stricter regulations. The employers should prove not only that they have a training regimen, but also how it will be useful to the trainees in their own country (carefully placing a key into a cellphone keypad: not useful). The way blue-collar workers are treated in Japan is disgraceful, and the fact that foreign trainees are treated even worse is despicable. Japan has already been called out by the US for its role in trafficking women, and it must change its foreign trainee system before once again faces censure from the world for continuing its slave trade from the 1930s.
