Over 7,200 Japan firms employing foreign trainees broke law --- Kyodo News

TOKYO - Illegal practices were uncovered at 7,247 workplaces in Japan that employed foreign trainees last year, the government said recently, apparently substantiating criticism of companies participating in the controversial, decades-old program for their alleged human rights infringements. The most common violations involved breaches of safety rules, with the second most common being unpaid wages, according to data based on the labor ministry's on-site inspections at 9,829 companies alleged to have engaged in misconduct. The data came as the government considers overhauling the trainee program, which was established in 1993. The system was introduced primarily for the agricultural and manufacturing sectors but has been under increased scrutiny following multiple allegations of trainee harassment and abuse. Among the violations uncovered by the inspections, 2,326 cases, or 23.7 percent, were in breach of safety rules such as unsafe use of machines, while 1,666 cases, or 16.9 percent, were related to unpaid wages, with one firm found to have made four foreign trainees work over 100 hours of illegal overtime a month. In another case, a foreign trainee was tasked with using a crane to lift loads upwards of 1 ton, even though the person had not completed the required training course and was not qualified to carry out the operation. A total of 21 cases deemed by labor standards inspections offices as serious or malicious violations have been sent to prosecutors, the ministry said. "We will continue to make efforts to supervise and instruct companies," said a ministry official, with the number of foreign trainees in Japan on the rise after a drop due to the coronavirus pandemic. As of the end of 2022, there were around 325,000 foreign trainees in Japan, up from some 276,000 in 2021. In late April, a government panel proposed scrapping the trainee program for foreigners and switching to a new system in order to address the prevalence of cases involving alleged unpaid wages and other human rights violations. Critics say that although the existing program is ostensibly in place to transfer knowledge and skills to developing countries, in practice it has been used as a cover for companies seeking to import cheap labor from abroad as the working-age population in Japan continues to shrink. ==Kyodo

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