Black company (Japan)

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This article is about the Japanese term. For other uses, see Black company.

A black company (ブラック企業/ブラック会社, burakku kigyō/burakku gaisha), also referred to in English as a black corporation or black business, is a Japanese term for an exploitative, sweatshop-type employment system.

The term "sweatshop" is associated with manufacturing, and the garment trade in particular; however, in Japan black companies are most often associated with office work than the clothing industry.

Etymology

The term "black company" was coined in the early 2000s by young IT workers but has since come to be applied to various industries.[1]

Conditions

While specifics may vary from workplace to workplace and company to company, a typical practice at a black company is to hire a large number of young employees and then force them to work large amounts of overtime without overtime pay. Conditions are poor, and workers are subjected to verbal abuse and "power harassment" (bullying) by their superiors.[1] In order to make the employees stay, superiors of black companies would often threaten young employees with disrepute if they chose to quit.

Noteworthy cases

Mina Mori, a 26-year-old employee of the restaurant chain

Labor Bureau, which recognized work-related stress as the cause of the decline of her mental health.[3][4] In December 2015, Watami reached an out-of-court settlement of ¥130 million (equivalent to ¥132.52 million in 2019) with the family, and Watami founder Miki Watanabe apologized.[5]

See also

References

  1. ^
    OCLC 21225620. Archived from the original
     on 6 February 2024. Retrieved 16 February 2024.
  2. OCLC 30856250. Archived
    from the original on 7 November 2023. Retrieved 16 February 2024. Earlier this year, the suicide of 26-year-old Mina Mori was accepted as karoshi after an investigation found she'd been clocking up 140 hours of overtime every month, working at a popular chain restaurant called Watami.
  3. ^ "Izakaya restaurant chain worker's suicide recognized as work-related". Japan Press Weekly. 22–28 February 2012. Archived from the original on 16 February 2024. Retrieved 16 February 2024. On February 14, a workers' accident compensation insurance examiner determined that a worker of a major Japanese casual dining and drinking (izakaya) chain company committed suicide due to mental health problems caused by excessively long working hours.
  4. ^ Brasor, Philip (17 June 2012). "Watami under scrutiny after karōshi".
    OCLC 21225620. Archived from the original
     on 4 June 2023. Retrieved 16 February 2024. On Feb. 14, the Kanagawa Prefecture Labor Standards Office deemed the death of 26-year-old Mina Mori, who committed suicide on June 12, 2008, to be a case of karōshi, or "death from overwork."
  5. OCLC 21225620. Archived from the original
    on 11 December 2015. Retrieved 16 February 2024. The defendants, including the company and its founder, Upper House lawmaker Miki Watanabe, agreed on Tuesday to pay around ¥130 million in damages, said Kazunari Tamaki, a lawyer for the woman's parents.
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