Japan Company/ New Worker Relationships: Updated Dec. 9, 2024.

 

Japan labor panel debates how far firms should go to stop student job-hunter harassment

Article Source:  https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241129/p2a/00m/0bu/024000c

Ideas:

Unfortunately, Japan seems to be behind the times related to human rights issues, such as sexual issues, stress interviews and power harassment as all these issues have rules and regulations in the EU and the US.

For example when "me too" situation exploded around the world, and many countries took notice and dealt with the issue, not much even came up in Japan, and Japanese women didn't speak up about it at all, or not many did.

Job seekers should not have to deal with any of these issues in Japan, as even Japan is now in the 21st century or should be.

Again, many of these issues including sexual harassment are well defined criminal activities in the EU and the US, and they shouldn't happen in Japan too, but unfortunately they do.

Job hunting students should not feel any pressure too, if they decide to not accept the job offer from one company and they want to go to another company, which might be very common in Japan as the first company might put pressure on the student job seeker to take their offer even though they want to accept the offer of another company.

Japan seems to have a so-called labor shortage as this time, which means there a lot of jobs to choose from so student job seekers don't have to feel pressure from companies that put pressure on them to accept their offer.

All of these preventive measures are good and needed for Japan to come into the 21st century related to human rights issues related to work.

And even more important preventive measures related to interns and mid-career applicants also need to be protected from greedy companies who don't respect the human rights of these groups.

Issuing apologies is not going to be enough as some companies might use it as they will know all they need to do is apologize when there might have been some real damage, even criminal damage to the job seeker.

Companies here are trying to get around any other forms of harassment, and basically saying the current law is enough handle other forms of harassment.

Its very sad, that companies don't want to include any and all forms of harassment which they might know these things happen and they have no way to control all situations in their company.

A company should not be allowed to ask applicants uncomfortable questions, but maybe challenging questions are OK if they are used in the appropriate manner and have no sexual or family related topics.

And yes job hunting students should have all the protections needed to guard against greedy companies trying to take advantage of students.

And for sure, abusive type interviews should not be outlawed and should never be used in any job interviews.

Of course the labor ministry has good intentions but unfortunately, as usual, politics will get in the way of good intentions and any new measures or laws they might try to implement will be watered down and might not have any real affect in the Japanese workplace in the future.

Have a nice day!