ブラック企業 – (Bulakku-kigyou) Black company

9th March – 弥生

The companies where do not consider the workers’s health, work life balance, personality etc. Those companies have characteristics of long work hours, too many over time hours, giving the impossible tasks, not paying legally, have variety of harassment and high volume of turnover rate. This has been Japanese society’s huge issue.

Many people might think Japanese people are hard workers. However, many Japanese companies take advantage of this characteristics of Japanese, they put too much pressure on workers and make them work too much – Those companies are called ブラック企業 (Bulakku-kigyou) and spreading all over Japan, even the popular companies too.

Japan has special hiring system, that all university graduates start job hunting at the same time (Third year of university in March) and start working at the same time (On April after graduated at fourth university grades), in different companies.

Therefore, most companies welcomes newly graduate workers on every April, however over 30% of them quit jobs within 3years… One of the reason is that the companies they got in are Black company. Black companies hire high volume of new workers and use them till they feel a lot stress, then fire them and get new fresh workers again and again… this is the cycle of black company.

By law, Company can give 40 hours of overwork per week, 45 hours per month in Japan. However heaps, very many companies break the rules and force the workers do the サービス残業 (Service-zangyou) which is not paid overwork.

Even Black companies try workers not be able to use their paid holiday, even people think having long continuous holiday causes troubles for coworkers so they take it a day each. Average day-offs are 120 days per year (Mostly Saturday and Sunday, public holiday) but if the day-offs are less than 100, it is considered as Black company.

Japanese companies have the tradition that bosses and people who worked longer than others have extreme authorities and others cannot oppose their order. There are silent-compulsion that pressures weaker workers. People with authorities does a few works and use the others till they become sick, that is why the black companies gain so much profit and keep it mostly by themselves. Moreover, Japanese society have made a tendency to think that quitting one job is bad and continuing to work at one company is virtue. Many people believe it and the fact that many hiring manager think this way too.

In Japan, it has been said that around 100 people die due to overwork. Even this number might be wrong as those companies try to hide the actual information, so they announce fake information that they did not die from the overwork.

Another research showed that people who committed suicide because of work related cause was over 2000, in 2018. It was revealed that half percentage of Japanese feel stress from the amount of tasks, quality of works, pressure from the boss /superiors and relationship with workmates.

But, why those people just quit jobs to be free from this work related stress?

There are different reasons, but common ones are;

-The work environment is terrible, but salary is good

-It is very hard to get another job (As Japanese society have negative impression for job-hoppers, people who changed previous jobs several times – considered as gutless or when they get older it is harder to get new jobs)

-The company does not let the person leave the company

-Feel bad for quitting as the tasks will hand in to the their co-coworkers

-Cannot speak to the boss that they want to quit as they are scary

-peer-pressure and having too much responsibility

etc…

These days, there are even the website informing which companies are black company and have reviews commented by previous workers. If you get a job in Japan, it is better to check those website and see the company is really worth getting in!