Foreign trainees or slaves?

Earlier this month, the Yomiuri newspaper carried an article about an auto parts manufacturer in Akitakata, Hiroshima, which is being investigated for hiring more foreign "trainees" than allowed by the rules. The company apparently padded the number of its regular employees, so that it could bring on an additional three Chinese trainees to add to the three already working there. The company had discovered that not only were the trainees able to do the same work as locals, they are more than 50% cheaper.

While this case may not seem like such a big deal, it is the tip of a pretty ugly iceberg. The government's foreign trainee program, which started with the grand design of helping to lift the basic skills of Japan's neighbors, now appears to have degenerated into being little more than a pipeline of low-cost laborers to keep struggling small manufacturers and farmers going.

The trainees work/train under near-slavery conditions and the fall-out from this seems to be increasing. Last year alone, 1,888 of them ran away from their postings, many going on to become illegal workers elsewhere in the country. Broken down by nationality, they numbered 3,516 Chinese, 2,629 Vietnamese, and 1,498 Indonesians — pretty much the same ratios as the nationalities being brought in under the program.

There are about 83,000 trainees accepted into Japan each year, of which just over 70% (55,000 annually) are from China. They are allowed to work (ummm, sorry, "train") in 62 different types of industry, such as agriculture, food processing, construction, apparel, and animal husbandry.

The numbers in agriculture are a particular eye-opener and foretell labor trends in this country. Young Japanese really don't want to work the land and thus there are now about 9,000 foreign trainees bolstering the sector, compared with just 2,200 Japanese high school graduates.That means there is a 4:1 likelihood that next time you want to buy a daikon or eggs directly from the farm, you'd better be able to speak Mandarin.

The trainee system has been turned into a form of legalized "slavery." Most trainees for the duration of their three years have virtually no employment rights (they are, after all supposed to be trainees not employees) and are paid unbelievably low compensation — just 66,000 yen (average) a month plus accomodation in the first year, and a more luxurious 118,000 yen (average) or so for the following two years. Could you survive on this? 

The treatment some of these trainees are receiving is pretty shocking. The "Association Tokushima," a group assisting Chinese laborers with problems in Japan, says that they have documented a case of a 27-year old female trainee working for a Tokushima-based food processing plant, who received just 70,000 yen/month for working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, and an overtime allowance of just 300 yen/hour. Apparently she was working 14 hours a day, then moon-lighting doing farm work on Sundays.

In another case, covered in the Asahi Shimbun back in August, a Chinese female trainee arrived in Japan to learn how to grow spinach and strawberries. But somehow she wound up in a forestry company. While there, she was required to clean the company president's home and even polish his shoes. During her first year, in 2004, she received an allowance of 50,000 yen/month and 300 yen/hour for overtime.

After she "graduated" from her first year and become a so-called documented worker, her salary was supposedly lifted to 112,000 yen/month plus overtime. But in reality, the company deducted 90,000 yen/month for rent, futon lease (really!), washing machine lease, etc. To top it all off, one of her managers had her apartment key and about four months into her traineeship, started visiting and demanding sexual services.

Conditions like these came to the notice of the press in August, when a Chinese trainee at a pig farm in Chiba complained about the harsh work conditions and was told that his traineeship would be terminated. This of course meant that he would be banished back to China — trainees seldom get an extension unless the sponsoring company wants them. In despair, he went berserk and stabbed three people, including an official of the Chiba Agricultural Association, the very organization that had brought him to Japan in the first place. The official died. Since then, the Ministry of Agriculture and other trainee program-related ministries have started to review means of enforcing the rules of the program that are supposed to protect the trainees from these types of abuses.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, companies accepting foreign trainees and workers are mostly small-scale businesses with less than 19 employees. There were more than 180 documented cases of fraud or mistreatment last year and it is suspected that a lot more cases go unreported. In fact a Ministry of Health survey found that of 731 reviewed companies, a full 80% of them were violating the minimum wage law and labor standards law for their 2nd- and 3rd-year trainees.

Obviously the problem is severe enough that the ministry is allocating 400 million yen to its quango looking after the placement of trainees, JITCO, for the purpose of monitoring participating companies to make sure that they stay compliant with the trainee program rules.

With the falling birth rate and migration of the domestic workforce out of hard labor jobs, Japan clearly has to turn to foreign workers to keep things going. The government knows this and is infact planning to expand the trainee system. Among the proposals are to increase the number of trainees a company can employ from just one for every 20 staff, to an unlimited number, and to increase the variety of jobs that a trainee can fill. Some employer organizations are even calling for rule changes to make it legal to bring in unskilled foreign workers in the same way that they can already do with skilled ones.

But the expansion can't go ahead until someone takes responsibility for properly protecting the welfare of the trainees. Although JITCO is being assigned this role, with the increased number of inspectors, in fact, given that they are a major player (they account for about 60% oftrainees) in sourcing and matching the trainees, and so it seems like the current problems are in fact JITCO's to solve.

Instead, I feel that the government should legislate to keep traineeships to just one year and make sure that classes from a local education institution — which need new students — are incorporated. Once trained, graduates should be allowed to become regular workers and enjoy the benefits of a minimum salary, labor rights, and the ability to get their visas renewed. Those that don't pass their first year should be sent home.

Already a step in the right direction is being taken, in the way that semi-skilled Filippino health care workers are to be handled. If they pass their language tests and gain a solid record during their training period they will be allowed to stay and work in Japan indefinitely.

Terrie Lloyd writes a weekly newsletter for entrepreneurs and business people about business and political opportunities in Japan. You can find the newsletter at www.terrie.com. For further contact with Terrie, email him at terrie.lloyd@daijob.com.