17 ms·

Layoffs Taboo, Japan Workers Are Sent to the Boredom Room (2013)

wimagguc 10y ago
Strong laws that aim to protect labour seem to end up being contra-productive. I've seen it in Germany, for example, where it's pretty difficult to fire full-time employees. Berlin startups therefore either force their workforce to be self-employed, or, routinely hire people with a 6-months probationary period just to fire them the week before.
- yousry 10y ago
  In Germany It is also called "Katzentisch" (cat table). This practice got famous during the privatization of state enterprises. It was later supplemented by unsuitable tasks. For example woman had to handle heavy packages without proper equipment.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Those situations certainly happen; whether it's contra-productive depends on the overall effects, not just whether some cases exists. That said, some of these are just a result of incompetence by the legislators and/or courts. It's been a few years, but I've seen organizations in my country trying that "self-employed" and the Labour Court straightened them pretty quickly when they tried to fire someone. If you have a boss, fixed place of work, working hours, etc, you won't fool anyone. The six-month probationary period is mostly fixed by not allowing it to be constantly renewed. Replacing all your workflow twice a year (even if gradually) is a heavy tax.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  History teaches us what happens without any labour protection, so that's not an option. But a viable alternative to labour protection is a strong welfare system. That's the classic Denmark vs Germany comparison. Taxes are high in Denmark, but it's easy to hire and fire somebody. Which hurts business more?
  - aianus 10y ago
    > History teaches us what happens without any labour protection, so that's not an option. What, you become the richest, most powerful country in the world? (I think America has the weakest labour laws in the developed world).
    - Helmet 10y ago
      Well, there was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop And also this (which was, fundamentally, an economic institution): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States
      - chimeracoder 10y ago
        You can't really use slavery or sweatshops as an argument one way or the other here. Sweatshops were by no means limited to the US. Nor was slavery, for that matter. The main differences is that US slavery was domestic (and mostly contained to the south)[0]. Whereas European imperial powers (England, France, Belgium, etc.) outsourced their slavery, practicing forced relocation of people within their colonies and engaging those colonists in forced labor with the threat of violence[1]. That continued well into the 20th century. [0] Though not as much as people like to think - the North was very happy to make money off of the slave trade, as long as they didn't permanently hold those slaves. [1] One can try to engage in the abstract argument of, "well, is it philosophically better to enslave people within each others' native lands, rather than to bring them all to the seat of the empire and enslave them there", but that's a hair that's not worth splitting, and a far cry from the original statement.
    - morsch 10y ago
      The sum of power or wealth is not a very sensible metric, unless you are a country and not a person. The per-capita median of power or wealth is a more sensible metric. A specific lower percentile may be even more sensible.
    - bryanlarsen 10y ago
- lostboys67 10y ago
  I have always heard this but never seen any real documented proof. Its certainly not hard to fire/layoff people in the UK
- st3v3r 10y ago
  "routinely hire people with a 6-months probationary period just to fire them the week before" That's not due to labor law. That's due to the boss being a complete asshole.
- k__ 10y ago
  The company that employs my girlfriend fires full-time employees all the time. so it can't be that hard .
SeanLuke 10y ago
Very similar to the Rubber Rooms in various school districts around the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room
- theprotocol 10y ago
  Indeed, the article even mentions it in passing: >New York had “rubber rooms” where it put teachers who would sit — with full pay — while the city tried to fire them. The practice was ended in 2010.
- mc32 10y ago
  To note though, that's due to the strong unions in unionized school districts, lest anyone think its a regular feature of the American labor market.
- klenwell 10y ago
  First learned about this from This American Life: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/350/human-resources https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/350/... And, yes, it was the first thing I thought of, too, when I saw this thread.
donquichotte 10y ago
As a European, I am always amazed to hear about the agility in the US job market. i.e. quitting/getting fired with < a week's notice, being used to a 3-6 month's notice. It's interesting to see that the other extreme also exists.
- inanutshellus 10y ago
  On the flip-side, it's described as a terrible, terrible risk to hire anyone in a European country, because you're signing up for so much responsibility for them. You'd better really need someone before you hire them. You'd better really vet them because getting rid of a bad egg is nigh impossible. (Or so the narrative goes.)
  - donquichotte 10y ago
    It is! There's usually a 3-month evaluation period for tech jobs where I live, but I've never seen anyone getting fired in that time.
  - zorked 10y ago
    Also you may end up working at a place full of bad eggs. Prospective employees in Europe who have an interest in a productive life also have to vet the company to make sure they select employees carefully and put the effort to get rid of who shouldn't be there. And that's hard to do unless you know someone inside.
  - J-dawg 10y ago
    In the UK I sometimes feel like we get the worst of both worlds. There's a perception that it's nigh impossible to fire someone and that jobs are very secure, which leads to fairly conservative hiring policies and quite low wages (in the tech sector anyway - definitely low relative to contracting here or the equivalent job in the USA). In reality, jobs really aren't that secure after all. I personally worked for a rather cut-throat small company that fired at least 4 people during the short time I worked there. They'd all worked there for less than a year. I knew all of them personally, and none of them were terrible at their jobs or really deserved to be fired. I'm convinced one of them was fired just because his project came to an end and he was no longer required. You can't make a claim for unfair dismissal until you've worked somewhere for at least 2 years, so if you're fired before that time you've got very few options legally. I can't speak about after the 2 years has elapsed because I've got no experience of that. Maybe then it really does become very difficult to fire someone. But people move around more often these days, I'm sure a large percentage of most employers' workforces are under the 2 year mark at any time.
patio11 10y ago
This is not irrelevant to startups in Japan, either. If you attempt to fire someone who you (unwisely) brought on as a full-time employee, and they contest the firing, you will be brought before a local government functionary to make your case for it. "They're incompetent at their job." is insufficient grounds for firing. (You need to add "And we spent substantial documented effort retraining them and moving them to other positions, but we have not been able to find one where it worked out.")
- mikekchar 10y ago
  I have a tiny company (just me and my wife) in Japan and my accountant tells me never to hire a full time employee. What's the startup culture like in terms of hiring? Do people accept contract positions, or do you need to hire them full time?
  - patio11 10y ago
    Your accountant gives advice very similar to the advice of my accountant and the accountants of my friends. Japan has, essentially, a bifurcated employment market [+]. There exist people that accept contract positions; contract positions appear to be widely used within e.g. Tokyo startups. There also exist people who would not countenance a contract position. One of the key hiring challenges in Japanese startups is finding folks who are both a) productive and b) willing to participate in the half of the labor market that people-the-system-views-as-productive do not normally participate in. (One is not normally afforded huge flexibility in switching between these systems.) + Slightly more fractured than this suggests.
    - gommm 10y ago
      There's also the fact that people accepting contract positions are at a significant disadvantage regarding banks if they want to get a loan to buy a house. It's considered lower status to not be a seishain. But, on the other hand, when it comes to Software Engineering, salaries for contract positions tend to be higher and, in my experience, being a seishain or being a contract worker has no bearing on the competence of the person.
Neliquat 10y ago
I feel like I have worked with people in corporate who sought these situations out. A no-work job was their goal, and boy did they work hard trying to achieve it.
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  Not to mention actively subverting people who want to achieve something, adding more load to the rest of the team and just being a motivation drain. I've worked in a post socialist worker owned company where this culture existed - eg. a guy came to work doing nothing for 5 years because his role was obsolete, he was old and failed to retrain but was 5 years off retirement age, he was there all his life and family friends with middle management - so they covered for him. Coming in every day 8-4 doing nothing but web surfing in the corner of the office. Why should anyone else there do any work ? He wasn't the only one who got obsoleted with new tech, other people his age retrained successfully - he was a failure and he got rewarded. Plenty of situations like that in that company made me hate social criteria in work environment - even if I was required to do very little work and paid relatively well - I quit on my own because I wasn't able to accomplish almost anything significant in two years there even tough there were plenty of opportunities if the incentive structure was right. Leave social security to social services, UBI or whatever - don't screw with incentives or create blocks for people who actually want to do work. They did eventually fall apart in a few years when the political connections and money infusions dried out during the financial crisis.
- drakenot 10y ago
  I've always found it surprising how easy it is to find yourself in a no-work situation like this at a large corporation, without even trying! Projects will end, people and managers will get shuffled around and suddenly you have no direct work responsibilities for months and months. Sometimes years if you were to let it go on like that. It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two. I'd hop on Hacker News only to find all the links were already visited. I would try to learn some new technologies but it didn't have the same impact that learning them out of necessity had. Eventually you have to sound the alarm to people that you don't have work to do, sometimes repeatedly, before they will 'fix' the problem by assigning you somewhere else. I honestly think that this is the default state that workers settle into at many large companies. There are some small percentage of highly productive workers doing a ton of work, and a lot of very low productivity workers making up the rest of the ranks. I've never worked at a startup, but one of the things that I think I would find appealing about them is that there are so few people that everyone's function would be important and that situations like the above would be difficult to go unnoticed.
elvinyung 10y ago
Oh, huh. Interesting. In the first season of Silicon Valley, there's a part where (spoilers) a main character gets "unassigned" from a Google parody, and it's mentioned that it's inspired by some Japanese management technique. I didn't know that was actually true.
- BuuQu9hu 10y ago
  It happens in real life at Google, too.
- fennecfoxen 10y ago
  This is also what happens to teachers in the New York City school system after they've been caught out reading the newspaper while their students spend all class gambling. They call it the "rubber room". Technically these teachers are awaiting reassignment, pending arbitration. This is very slow, and I understand that there is a backlog from a long period of time where very little arbitration happened, because the school system was not paying their arbitrators. (Also, they may have decentralized the rubber room in recent years to inhibit visibility.)
  - davidlee1435 10y ago
    The article mentions that the practice was discontinued in 2010
- FabHK 10y ago
  (more spoilers) Yeah, Big Head on the roof chilling with the other guys - awesome :-)
- drewrv 10y ago
  It really amazes me how much of that show is true.
mc32 10y ago
With an aging population, how can you simultaneously have too many workers? Or how can you allow such misallocation of workers? These workers have a good 10 to 20 productive years left in them but instead they ate left to while away time rather than have them be productive for another company which is understaffed.
- mercurysmessage 10y ago
  Well, that depends on the number of jobs available, right? Also, most highly developed nations have low population growth and aging populations.
- toyg 10y ago
  > With an aging population, how can you simultaneously have too many workers? Automation. > how can you allow such misallocation of workers? Try telling a "sarariman" that from tomorrow he's supposed to be a janitor. "Workers" are people, and over a certain age most people simply don't like change, let alone change for the worse. It's not as simple as reallocating bodies.
  - mc32 10y ago
    I understand the implications but at the same time simply whiling away time unproductively has to take both a mental and physical toll. The companies are essentially saying "we don't need you/want you, but we're obliged to keep you, even though we'd rather not". How can you even socialize with productive workers who likely see you as a kind of parasite (parasites having currency in Japan as people who mot only don't contribute but take away).
fpig 10y ago
I almost automatically closed the tab because it looked like a paywall. Why do I have to click "Show full article" to see the article on the page for that article? O_O
- devilsbabe 10y ago
  Because it's the mobile version of the site. That button doesn't appear on the desktop version.
- Cenk 10y ago
  I’ve noticed a lot of news sites have started doing this. I assume it’s something to do with collecting analytics?
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  Depending on who you ask, it's one or more of: 1) So that the "free articles this month" counter doesn't decrement for stories you don't actually read. 2) So that they get metrics on which articles people actually read vs. loading in a tab and forgetting about. 3) Forcing an interaction manipulates your psychology so that you pay more attention to the page, increasing engagement.
- mercer 10y ago
  I vaguely remember implementing this exact thing for at least two clients, and if remember correctly the reason is that such a 'show full article' button allows anything 'below the fold' (meaning the button) to be more prominently visible. It's a rather ironic that I had to turn off my uMatrix filters to get the full 'experience' of that button.
lukeschlather 10y ago
For a smaller company I can see how this might be a problem, but Sony is a sprawling tech company with tons of divisions. That they're paying 40 people to sit around in a room with nothing to do is simply a failure of management. It's pretty cool that Japan has such a strong social contract, that executives have responsibility to and for their workers. But the social contract isn't the problem there, it's a lack of imagination.
- Retric 10y ago
  Exactly, large companies are going to get more than 5% turnover per year simply from people retiring / dying. If they cut back on hiring they can fairly quickly shrink and retraining is cheap when your willing to let a 50 year old worker sit in a room at full pay. The real issue is older workers are expensive and companies want a cheap workforce not lower headcount. Society on the other hand benefits when older workers are employed and can't supply unlimited quantities of well trained and cheap workers.
  - jdietrich 10y ago
    In Japan, cutting back on hiring is a huge problem. If you don't get a job straight out of college, you're effectively a second-class citizen. There is no second chance, there is no plan B. The job for life cuts both ways in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_recruiting_of_new_graduates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_recruiting_of_new...
    - Retric 10y ago
      This represents a giant economic opportunity for any company willing to be less stupid.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - mhurron 10y ago
        Ya just ignore the cultural reasons and pressures that cause the situation, easy, the free market fixes everything.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Not to mention stolen land via genocide, slave labor, accessible natural resources, huge geographic isolation from competition, and even a lucky point in time coinciding with the industrial revolution that began in Europe (and particularly Britain, which begat the U.S.). I think a lot of the anger in America today is coming out of the realization that we coming to have to compete on a level playing field for the first time in our nation's history.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > Not to mention stolen land via genocide, slave labor, accessible natural resources, huge geographic isolation from competition, and even a lucky point in time coinciding with the industrial revolution that began in Europe It's amazing how easily people forget about the long history of European imperial conquest, which continued well into the 20th century. > I think a lot of the anger in America today is coming out of the realization that we coming to have to compete on a level playing field for the first time in our nation's history. There is no level playing field. There isn't now, and there hasn't been for several centuries (if there ever even was).
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    > It's amazing how easily people forget about the long history of European imperial conquest. Some people, I'm fully cognizant of our (UK) colonial history, I just don't feel much reason to be appalled or proud of it, I wasn't born at the time. The history of the East India Company is absolutely fascinating (in a fairly horrible way).
- ThrowawayR2 10y ago
  >Not to mention stolen land via genocide, slave labor, accessible natural resources, huge geographic isolation from competition, and even a lucky point in time coinciding with the industrial revolution that began in Europe (and particularly Britain, which begat the U.S.). Similar things could be said of all the once-great powers of Europe and Asia. Big deal. (I really don't understand the self-loathing streak a lot of Americans seem to have. As a second-generation immigrant, I'm delighted and proud to be a citizen of a superpower and will fight to the last to keep it that way.)
witty_username 10y ago
Labor regulations are counterproductive because by making firing harder they make hiring harder.
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  I do think it's a balancing act though - we are incredibly lucky in tech where we can have infinite flexibility in what we do. If you are working at Walmart I actually think reasonable protections should be provided.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    Why? "Reasonable" protections unduly impose costs on companies and may cause disemployment effects. Now I know you'll say "companies are evil", but shareholders and banks loan to companies. When companies make profit some people make a profit. If you have noble goals of helping the poor, a NIT (negative income tax) which transfers money to the poor would be more efficient.
    - andy_ppp 10y ago
      Sure, protect the disadvantaged is my only goal - it's definitely worth trying your idea to do it.
- crpatino 10y ago
  By the same logic, medical schools are counterproductive because by making getting a degree harder make giving healthcare advice harder. Ditto for law schools. If you are going to throw your lot with an employer, you want to be very sure that said employer is willing to go the extra mile to bring you up and see you succeed; and yes, that will be harder that going to work for the first john that waves a $20USD bill in front of your nose. Employment does not make sense otherwise. No regulation, or much relaxed regulation, would be the equivalent of owning a capital intensive company that signs a deal to work exclusively for one customer. No sane investor would want to put more than 5% of their networth there, and only in the case that said investment paid heads and shoulders above the next best option in the market. So why do you expect employees to invest 100% of their time and effort in such a Devil's deal?
bitmapbrother 10y ago
>Mr. Tani’s managers at Sony are already upping the ante. Starting this month, the company has ordered him to work 12-hour shifts on an assembly line at a Sony plant in Toyosato, more than an hour’s drive away. He says he will comply. Now might be a good time to take that 54 month severance pay offer.
georgeecollins 10y ago
I would love to be hired by Sony (even on commission) to figure out something valuable for those forty holdouts in the story to do. There is probably something you can do with that talent that is better than having them sit around.
- rwmj 10y ago
  Yup it's odd isn't it. I bet more than one of them has an idea for a Sony product or other start up idea, and the rest of them have all the time in the world to develop it -- on full pay, no less. And if they don't have the skills, well they also have plenty of time to learn. It also sounds to me like a management failure.
vivekd 10y ago
>In February, just two years shy of Mrs. Sato’s retirement, a manager had blunt news: “Your job no longer exists.” She refused to quit, and was dispatched to the chase-out room. Well of course there are going to be problems when you try and lay off someone just a few years before their retirement. I don't see any big cultural differences the article references here. This just sounds like a company trying to rip off their long term workers out of their full retirement package. I'm sure if these retirement packages referenced in the article were anywhere close to what the workers would get on full retirement, of course they would take it rather than going to boredom rooms. The author of this article seems to have simply taken Sonys word that the "retirement packages were generous."
- chaostheory 10y ago
  They also fail to mention that for many ' lifetime' salary man positions, the hours are really long but the pay is low.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    'I heard a great line about this once, and unfortunately I cannot remember the source: “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.” The best employees aren’t compensated with large option grants or eye popping bonuses — they’re simply anointed as “princes”, given their pick of projects to work on, receive plum assignments, and get their status acknowledged (in ways great and small) by the other employees.' From http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/
    - Flammy 10y ago
      Really interesting, thanks for sharing. Does anyone know of any equivalents from other cultures of similar practices?
      - smallnamespace 10y ago
emodendroket 10y ago
Remember the Rubber Rooms in NYC schools?
rpeden 10y ago
Sounds a bit like what John Sculley did to Steve Jobs.
falcor84 10y ago
A probably silly question from someone without any understanding of the relevant laws: I'm assuming that it is ok to fire employees when a company goes bankrupt, even when that company is fully owned by another company that is still doing well. Would it be possible to create a new subsidiary for each new employee? The subsidiary's CEO (only employee) would need to generate revenue as dictated by the company's chairman of the board, which would effectively be the employee's direct manager. I imagine there would be tons of complications, but wonder whether that could work in theory.
- whatnotests 10y ago
  This seems like a page right out of Catbert's book of management tricks.

Strong laws that aim to protect labour seem to end up being contra-productive. I've seen it in Germany, for example, where it's pretty difficult to fire full-time employees. Berlin startups therefore either force their workforce to be self-employed, or, routinely hire people with a 6-months probationary period just to fire them the week before.

yousry 10y ago
In Germany It is also called "Katzentisch" (cat table). This practice got famous during the privatization of state enterprises. It was later supplemented by unsuitable tasks. For example woman had to handle heavy packages without proper equipment.
icebraining 10y ago
Those situations certainly happen; whether it's contra-productive depends on the overall effects, not just whether some cases exists. That said, some of these are just a result of incompetence by the legislators and/or courts. It's been a few years, but I've seen organizations in my country trying that "self-employed" and the Labour Court straightened them pretty quickly when they tried to fire someone. If you have a boss, fixed place of work, working hours, etc, you won't fool anyone. The six-month probationary period is mostly fixed by not allowing it to be constantly renewed. Replacing all your workflow twice a year (even if gradually) is a heavy tax.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
History teaches us what happens without any labour protection, so that's not an option. But a viable alternative to labour protection is a strong welfare system. That's the classic Denmark vs Germany comparison. Taxes are high in Denmark, but it's easy to hire and fire somebody. Which hurts business more?
- aianus 10y ago
  > History teaches us what happens without any labour protection, so that's not an option. What, you become the richest, most powerful country in the world? (I think America has the weakest labour laws in the developed world).
  - Helmet 10y ago
    Well, there was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop And also this (which was, fundamentally, an economic institution): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      You can't really use slavery or sweatshops as an argument one way or the other here. Sweatshops were by no means limited to the US. Nor was slavery, for that matter. The main differences is that US slavery was domestic (and mostly contained to the south)[0]. Whereas European imperial powers (England, France, Belgium, etc.) outsourced their slavery, practicing forced relocation of people within their colonies and engaging those colonists in forced labor with the threat of violence[1]. That continued well into the 20th century. [0] Though not as much as people like to think - the North was very happy to make money off of the slave trade, as long as they didn't permanently hold those slaves. [1] One can try to engage in the abstract argument of, "well, is it philosophically better to enslave people within each others' native lands, rather than to bring them all to the seat of the empire and enslave them there", but that's a hair that's not worth splitting, and a far cry from the original statement.
  - morsch 10y ago
    The sum of power or wealth is not a very sensible metric, unless you are a country and not a person. The per-capita median of power or wealth is a more sensible metric. A specific lower percentile may be even more sensible.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
lostboys67 10y ago
I have always heard this but never seen any real documented proof. Its certainly not hard to fire/layoff people in the UK
st3v3r 10y ago
"routinely hire people with a 6-months probationary period just to fire them the week before" That's not due to labor law. That's due to the boss being a complete asshole.
k__ 10y ago
The company that employs my girlfriend fires full-time employees all the time. so it can't be that hard .

SeanLuke 10y ago

Very similar to the Rubber Rooms in various school districts around the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room

theprotocol 10y ago
Indeed, the article even mentions it in passing: >New York had “rubber rooms” where it put teachers who would sit — with full pay — while the city tried to fire them. The practice was ended in 2010.
mc32 10y ago
To note though, that's due to the strong unions in unionized school districts, lest anyone think its a regular feature of the American labor market.
klenwell 10y ago
First learned about this from This American Life: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/350/human-resources https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/350/... And, yes, it was the first thing I thought of, too, when I saw this thread.

donquichotte 10y ago

As a European, I am always amazed to hear about the agility in the US job market. i.e. quitting/getting fired with < a week's notice, being used to a 3-6 month's notice. It's interesting to see that the other extreme also exists.

inanutshellus 10y ago
On the flip-side, it's described as a terrible, terrible risk to hire anyone in a European country, because you're signing up for so much responsibility for them. You'd better really need someone before you hire them. You'd better really vet them because getting rid of a bad egg is nigh impossible. (Or so the narrative goes.)
- donquichotte 10y ago
  It is! There's usually a 3-month evaluation period for tech jobs where I live, but I've never seen anyone getting fired in that time.
- zorked 10y ago
  Also you may end up working at a place full of bad eggs. Prospective employees in Europe who have an interest in a productive life also have to vet the company to make sure they select employees carefully and put the effort to get rid of who shouldn't be there. And that's hard to do unless you know someone inside.
- J-dawg 10y ago
  In the UK I sometimes feel like we get the worst of both worlds. There's a perception that it's nigh impossible to fire someone and that jobs are very secure, which leads to fairly conservative hiring policies and quite low wages (in the tech sector anyway - definitely low relative to contracting here or the equivalent job in the USA). In reality, jobs really aren't that secure after all. I personally worked for a rather cut-throat small company that fired at least 4 people during the short time I worked there. They'd all worked there for less than a year. I knew all of them personally, and none of them were terrible at their jobs or really deserved to be fired. I'm convinced one of them was fired just because his project came to an end and he was no longer required. You can't make a claim for unfair dismissal until you've worked somewhere for at least 2 years, so if you're fired before that time you've got very few options legally. I can't speak about after the 2 years has elapsed because I've got no experience of that. Maybe then it really does become very difficult to fire someone. But people move around more often these days, I'm sure a large percentage of most employers' workforces are under the 2 year mark at any time.

patio11 10y ago

This is not irrelevant to startups in Japan, either. If you attempt to fire someone who you (unwisely) brought on as a full-time employee, and they contest the firing, you will be brought before a local government functionary to make your case for it. "They're incompetent at their job." is insufficient grounds for firing. (You need to add "And we spent substantial documented effort retraining them and moving them to other positions, but we have not been able to find one where it worked out.")

mikekchar 10y ago
I have a tiny company (just me and my wife) in Japan and my accountant tells me never to hire a full time employee. What's the startup culture like in terms of hiring? Do people accept contract positions, or do you need to hire them full time?
- patio11 10y ago
  Your accountant gives advice very similar to the advice of my accountant and the accountants of my friends. Japan has, essentially, a bifurcated employment market [+]. There exist people that accept contract positions; contract positions appear to be widely used within e.g. Tokyo startups. There also exist people who would not countenance a contract position. One of the key hiring challenges in Japanese startups is finding folks who are both a) productive and b) willing to participate in the half of the labor market that people-the-system-views-as-productive do not normally participate in. (One is not normally afforded huge flexibility in switching between these systems.) + Slightly more fractured than this suggests.
  - gommm 10y ago
    There's also the fact that people accepting contract positions are at a significant disadvantage regarding banks if they want to get a loan to buy a house. It's considered lower status to not be a seishain. But, on the other hand, when it comes to Software Engineering, salaries for contract positions tend to be higher and, in my experience, being a seishain or being a contract worker has no bearing on the competence of the person.

Neliquat 10y ago

I feel like I have worked with people in corporate who sought these situations out. A no-work job was their goal, and boy did they work hard trying to achieve it.

rubber_duck 10y ago
Not to mention actively subverting people who want to achieve something, adding more load to the rest of the team and just being a motivation drain. I've worked in a post socialist worker owned company where this culture existed - eg. a guy came to work doing nothing for 5 years because his role was obsolete, he was old and failed to retrain but was 5 years off retirement age, he was there all his life and family friends with middle management - so they covered for him. Coming in every day 8-4 doing nothing but web surfing in the corner of the office. Why should anyone else there do any work ? He wasn't the only one who got obsoleted with new tech, other people his age retrained successfully - he was a failure and he got rewarded. Plenty of situations like that in that company made me hate social criteria in work environment - even if I was required to do very little work and paid relatively well - I quit on my own because I wasn't able to accomplish almost anything significant in two years there even tough there were plenty of opportunities if the incentive structure was right. Leave social security to social services, UBI or whatever - don't screw with incentives or create blocks for people who actually want to do work. They did eventually fall apart in a few years when the political connections and money infusions dried out during the financial crisis.
drakenot 10y ago
I've always found it surprising how easy it is to find yourself in a no-work situation like this at a large corporation, without even trying! Projects will end, people and managers will get shuffled around and suddenly you have no direct work responsibilities for months and months. Sometimes years if you were to let it go on like that. It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two. I'd hop on Hacker News only to find all the links were already visited. I would try to learn some new technologies but it didn't have the same impact that learning them out of necessity had. Eventually you have to sound the alarm to people that you don't have work to do, sometimes repeatedly, before they will 'fix' the problem by assigning you somewhere else. I honestly think that this is the default state that workers settle into at many large companies. There are some small percentage of highly productive workers doing a ton of work, and a lot of very low productivity workers making up the rest of the ranks. I've never worked at a startup, but one of the things that I think I would find appealing about them is that there are so few people that everyone's function would be important and that situations like the above would be difficult to go unnoticed.

elvinyung 10y ago

Oh, huh. Interesting. In the first season of Silicon Valley, there's a part where (spoilers) a main character gets "unassigned" from a Google parody, and it's mentioned that it's inspired by some Japanese management technique. I didn't know that was actually true.

BuuQu9hu 10y ago
It happens in real life at Google, too.
fennecfoxen 10y ago
This is also what happens to teachers in the New York City school system after they've been caught out reading the newspaper while their students spend all class gambling. They call it the "rubber room". Technically these teachers are awaiting reassignment, pending arbitration. This is very slow, and I understand that there is a backlog from a long period of time where very little arbitration happened, because the school system was not paying their arbitrators. (Also, they may have decentralized the rubber room in recent years to inhibit visibility.)
- davidlee1435 10y ago
  The article mentions that the practice was discontinued in 2010
FabHK 10y ago
(more spoilers) Yeah, Big Head on the roof chilling with the other guys - awesome :-)
drewrv 10y ago
It really amazes me how much of that show is true.

mc32 10y ago

With an aging population, how can you simultaneously have too many workers? Or how can you allow such misallocation of workers? These workers have a good 10 to 20 productive years left in them but instead they ate left to while away time rather than have them be productive for another company which is understaffed.

mercurysmessage 10y ago
Well, that depends on the number of jobs available, right? Also, most highly developed nations have low population growth and aging populations.
toyg 10y ago
> With an aging population, how can you simultaneously have too many workers? Automation. > how can you allow such misallocation of workers? Try telling a "sarariman" that from tomorrow he's supposed to be a janitor. "Workers" are people, and over a certain age most people simply don't like change, let alone change for the worse. It's not as simple as reallocating bodies.
- mc32 10y ago
  I understand the implications but at the same time simply whiling away time unproductively has to take both a mental and physical toll. The companies are essentially saying "we don't need you/want you, but we're obliged to keep you, even though we'd rather not". How can you even socialize with productive workers who likely see you as a kind of parasite (parasites having currency in Japan as people who mot only don't contribute but take away).

fpig 10y ago

I almost automatically closed the tab because it looked like a paywall. Why do I have to click "Show full article" to see the article on the page for that article? O_O

devilsbabe 10y ago
Because it's the mobile version of the site. That button doesn't appear on the desktop version.
Cenk 10y ago
I’ve noticed a lot of news sites have started doing this. I assume it’s something to do with collecting analytics?
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
Depending on who you ask, it's one or more of: 1) So that the "free articles this month" counter doesn't decrement for stories you don't actually read. 2) So that they get metrics on which articles people actually read vs. loading in a tab and forgetting about. 3) Forcing an interaction manipulates your psychology so that you pay more attention to the page, increasing engagement.
mercer 10y ago
I vaguely remember implementing this exact thing for at least two clients, and if remember correctly the reason is that such a 'show full article' button allows anything 'below the fold' (meaning the button) to be more prominently visible. It's a rather ironic that I had to turn off my uMatrix filters to get the full 'experience' of that button.

lukeschlather 10y ago

For a smaller company I can see how this might be a problem, but Sony is a sprawling tech company with tons of divisions. That they're paying 40 people to sit around in a room with nothing to do is simply a failure of management. It's pretty cool that Japan has such a strong social contract, that executives have responsibility to and for their workers. But the social contract isn't the problem there, it's a lack of imagination.

Retric 10y ago
Exactly, large companies are going to get more than 5% turnover per year simply from people retiring / dying. If they cut back on hiring they can fairly quickly shrink and retraining is cheap when your willing to let a 50 year old worker sit in a room at full pay. The real issue is older workers are expensive and companies want a cheap workforce not lower headcount. Society on the other hand benefits when older workers are employed and can't supply unlimited quantities of well trained and cheap workers.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  In Japan, cutting back on hiring is a huge problem. If you don't get a job straight out of college, you're effectively a second-class citizen. There is no second chance, there is no plan B. The job for life cuts both ways in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_recruiting_of_new_graduates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_recruiting_of_new...
  - Retric 10y ago
    This represents a giant economic opportunity for any company willing to be less stupid.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - mhurron 10y ago
      Ya just ignore the cultural reasons and pressures that cause the situation, easy, the free market fixes everything.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

Not to mention stolen land via genocide, slave labor, accessible natural resources, huge geographic isolation from competition, and even a lucky point in time coinciding with the industrial revolution that began in Europe (and particularly Britain, which begat the U.S.). I think a lot of the anger in America today is coming out of the realization that we coming to have to compete on a level playing field for the first time in our nation's history.

chimeracoder 10y ago
> Not to mention stolen land via genocide, slave labor, accessible natural resources, huge geographic isolation from competition, and even a lucky point in time coinciding with the industrial revolution that began in Europe It's amazing how easily people forget about the long history of European imperial conquest, which continued well into the 20th century. > I think a lot of the anger in America today is coming out of the realization that we coming to have to compete on a level playing field for the first time in our nation's history. There is no level playing field. There isn't now, and there hasn't been for several centuries (if there ever even was).
- noir_lord 10y ago
  > It's amazing how easily people forget about the long history of European imperial conquest. Some people, I'm fully cognizant of our (UK) colonial history, I just don't feel much reason to be appalled or proud of it, I wasn't born at the time. The history of the East India Company is absolutely fascinating (in a fairly horrible way).
ThrowawayR2 10y ago
>Not to mention stolen land via genocide, slave labor, accessible natural resources, huge geographic isolation from competition, and even a lucky point in time coinciding with the industrial revolution that began in Europe (and particularly Britain, which begat the U.S.). Similar things could be said of all the once-great powers of Europe and Asia. Big deal. (I really don't understand the self-loathing streak a lot of Americans seem to have. As a second-generation immigrant, I'm delighted and proud to be a citizen of a superpower and will fight to the last to keep it that way.)

witty_username 10y ago

Labor regulations are counterproductive because by making firing harder they make hiring harder.

andy_ppp 10y ago
I do think it's a balancing act though - we are incredibly lucky in tech where we can have infinite flexibility in what we do. If you are working at Walmart I actually think reasonable protections should be provided.
- witty_username 10y ago
  Why? "Reasonable" protections unduly impose costs on companies and may cause disemployment effects. Now I know you'll say "companies are evil", but shareholders and banks loan to companies. When companies make profit some people make a profit. If you have noble goals of helping the poor, a NIT (negative income tax) which transfers money to the poor would be more efficient.
  - andy_ppp 10y ago
    Sure, protect the disadvantaged is my only goal - it's definitely worth trying your idea to do it.
crpatino 10y ago
By the same logic, medical schools are counterproductive because by making getting a degree harder make giving healthcare advice harder. Ditto for law schools. If you are going to throw your lot with an employer, you want to be very sure that said employer is willing to go the extra mile to bring you up and see you succeed; and yes, that will be harder that going to work for the first john that waves a $20USD bill in front of your nose. Employment does not make sense otherwise. No regulation, or much relaxed regulation, would be the equivalent of owning a capital intensive company that signs a deal to work exclusively for one customer. No sane investor would want to put more than 5% of their networth there, and only in the case that said investment paid heads and shoulders above the next best option in the market. So why do you expect employees to invest 100% of their time and effort in such a Devil's deal?

bitmapbrother 10y ago

>Mr. Tani’s managers at Sony are already upping the ante. Starting this month, the company has ordered him to work 12-hour shifts on an assembly line at a Sony plant in Toyosato, more than an hour’s drive away. He says he will comply. Now might be a good time to take that 54 month severance pay offer.

georgeecollins 10y ago

I would love to be hired by Sony (even on commission) to figure out something valuable for those forty holdouts in the story to do. There is probably something you can do with that talent that is better than having them sit around.

rwmj 10y ago
Yup it's odd isn't it. I bet more than one of them has an idea for a Sony product or other start up idea, and the rest of them have all the time in the world to develop it -- on full pay, no less. And if they don't have the skills, well they also have plenty of time to learn. It also sounds to me like a management failure.

vivekd 10y ago

>In February, just two years shy of Mrs. Sato’s retirement, a manager had blunt news: “Your job no longer exists.” She refused to quit, and was dispatched to the chase-out room. Well of course there are going to be problems when you try and lay off someone just a few years before their retirement. I don't see any big cultural differences the article references here. This just sounds like a company trying to rip off their long term workers out of their full retirement package. I'm sure if these retirement packages referenced in the article were anywhere close to what the workers would get on full retirement, of course they would take it rather than going to boredom rooms. The author of this article seems to have simply taken Sonys word that the "retirement packages were generous."

chaostheory 10y ago
They also fail to mention that for many ' lifetime' salary man positions, the hours are really long but the pay is low.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  'I heard a great line about this once, and unfortunately I cannot remember the source: “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.” The best employees aren’t compensated with large option grants or eye popping bonuses — they’re simply anointed as “princes”, given their pick of projects to work on, receive plum assignments, and get their status acknowledged (in ways great and small) by the other employees.' From http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/
  - Flammy 10y ago
    Really interesting, thanks for sharing. Does anyone know of any equivalents from other cultures of similar practices?
    - smallnamespace 10y ago

emodendroket 10y ago

Remember the Rubber Rooms in NYC schools?

rpeden 10y ago

Sounds a bit like what John Sculley did to Steve Jobs.

falcor84 10y ago

A probably silly question from someone without any understanding of the relevant laws: I'm assuming that it is ok to fire employees when a company goes bankrupt, even when that company is fully owned by another company that is still doing well. Would it be possible to create a new subsidiary for each new employee? The subsidiary's CEO (only employee) would need to generate revenue as dictated by the company's chairman of the board, which would effectively be the employee's direct manager. I imagine there would be tons of complications, but wonder whether that could work in theory.

whatnotests 10y ago
This seems like a page right out of Catbert's book of management tricks.