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Factory, employment agency in Japan must pay for exploiting interns
Officially, they came to Japan for training, but in reality, they were forced to work long hours for little pay. A Japanese court on Monday ordered a sewing company and an employment service to pay 4.4 million yen (52,250 dollars) in damages, ruling that the firms had exploited four Chinese interns. The High Court in…
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Japan looks for answers as China surges past
Japan’s GDP slump, and news that China’s economy is now bigger, will intensify the search for answers on turning around the economy. To some, the answer lies offshore. Not in the traditional sense of exporting cars and televisions, but in bringing in new workers from Japan’s rapidly developing neighbours. The Japanese are good at finding…
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Govt must improve foreign intern program
The revised Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law took effect in July, enhancing legal protection for foreign interns participating in a government-authorized training program. However, some observers say the revision of the law merely puts off dealing with the real problems. The program is said to be occupational training in name only, with some going…
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Strict immigration rules may threaten Japan’s future
Her new country needs her, her new employer adores her, and Joyce Anne Paulino, who landed here 14 months ago knowing not a word of the language, can now say in Japanese that she’d like very much to stay. But Paulino, 31, a nurse from the Philippines, worries about the odds. To stay in Japan…
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The only Filipino nurse to pass Japan’s nursing exam
Ever Lalin, like others in the first batch of 98 nurses and caregivers who went to Japan May last year for a training stint preparatory to taking the Japanese nursing licensure exam, had no prior lessons in the Niponggo language. “Halimaw ah (A monster’s feat),” cheered nurse bloggers when it was announced last March that…
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Japan’s trainee programme ‘human trafficking’: lawyer
A Japanese human rights lawyer Thursday labelled a government-backed foreign trainee programme as a “form of human trafficking”, saying dozens had died from apparent overwork. Japan has invited tens of thousands of foreigners for industrial training programmes as low-wage apprentices, mostly from China, Indonesia and the Philippines, since the 1990s, officially so they can learn…
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Dying to work: Japan Inc.’s foreign trainees
“The Industrial Trainees and Technical Interns program often fuels demand for exploitative cheap labor under conditions that constitute violations of the right to physical and mental health, physical integrity, freedom of expression and movement of foreign trainees and interns, and that in some cases may well amount to slavery. This program should be discontinued and…
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Stop exploiting trainees as cheap labor: lawyers
It is high time the government faced facts and scrapped its industrial training and internship program because it is used to exploit foreign trainees as a cheap source of labor, a lawyer group said Thursday, claiming the purpose of the system and its reality are worlds apart. The trainee system is touted as making an…
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Japan Training Program Is Said to Exploit Workers
Six young Chinese women arrived in this historic city three summers ago, among the tens of thousands of apprentices brought to Japan each year on the promise of job training, good pay and a chance at a better life back home. Instead, the women say, they were subjected to 16-hour workdays assembling cellphones at below…
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Department stores and sweat shops
It’s one Japan for rich Chinese shoppers, another for low-skilled workers Many Japanese strive to keep up egalitarian appearances. Porsche drivers keep their cars tactfully hidden away. Houses of the well-heeled are unflashy. In the finest department stores, even the demure “elevator girls” are treated with impeccable politeness. But when it comes to the way…