Japanese workers turn to resignation agencies
metropolisjapan.com
metropolisjapan.com
Personally (living in Japan) I've never experienced something like this, but it does happen.
I have some friends-of-friends living in Japan. It’s interesting to hear their experience with culture evolve over time. They openly admit that they get a free pass around some of the more difficult cultural situations due to not being born and raised originally in Japan.
Hearing their stories has definitely given me a different perspective on some of the overly idealized views of Japan that get repeated online. A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
That kind of whataboutism is a common issue in politics though. Why can't we all go and look for every field of politics look what other countries do and if what they do is better, then do that as well without taking the worse parts?
For example, look at Switzerland when it comes to education, to Germany's Mittelstand and trades education system for a vibrant and healthy SME business field, to the US for access to venture capital and cutting-edge research, to Austria or Denmark for their pension system, to Japan for public transport reliability...
Famously, NYC builds new subway tunnels very expensively, about three times more expensively than Paris. What stands in the way of a substantial cost reduction? Many factors, including local unions that defend their lucrative turf.
The French withdrew from the project of the Californian High-Speed Rail blaming total governmental dysfunction and comparing Californian public sector negatively to Morocco, where a French-built HSR actually was built successfully.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/538683/umfrag...
Which in Cali would mean SF to LA, and that is probably not going to happen.
I beg to differ. There is quite a lot of HSR construction in Europe going on right now.
Italy: Brescia-Verona, Verona-Vicenza, Vicenza-Padua, the Brenner Basis Tunnel to Austria, Turin-Lyon, Naples-Bari, Palermo-Catania-Messina
France: Bordeaux-Toulouse, Lyon-Turin to Italy
Spain: Murcia-Almería, the Basque Y, Burgos–Vitoria-Gasteiz, Madrid-Extremadura
Austria: Koralmbahn, Semmering Basis Tunnel
Germany-Denmark: Fehmarn Tunnel
UK: London-Birmingham
The Baltic States: Rail Baltica
All in active construction right now. Some with delays, as usual.
If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer. Otherwise you're into non-accepted vacation territory, which could lead to financial penalties (basically withdrawing your salary, with potential tax adjustements. They could also try to sue you, and given you're fleeing assume they'd get a default judgement for instance)
Then there's all the paperwork you actually want to have properly done by your employer. They're legally obligated to, but it's always harder if you're in adversarial mode.
All in all, you can still quit cold turkey ("bakkure"), but that's a usually a PITA. Getting a pro to negociate a clean separation will be better than just disappearing, if you're not in the mood/capacity to face your employer.
PS; There are magical words that would give any employee an immediate option to never see their employer again. I don't want them in my comments, but anyone interested will find them with a simple search.
It doesn't necessarily need their cooperation. A letter sent by registered mail saying "I am using my paid leave for x days from y day", then another one saying "I resign on y day + two weeks" is enough. Of course, people would actually need to know and be willing to use their labor rights in order to do that, which is the service that quitting agents are providing.
I have never had a resignation period of less then 1 month in several European countries (BeNeLux and Poland)
My last job had resignation period of 7 week from the Monday after sending my notice.
I've had lots of arguments with Europeans on the internet about whether the benefit of their job security exceeds the costs of what Americans who are aware of the European system tend to perceive as indentured servitude.
Over a month seems really long to me.
It puts the employee in the strongest position, but doesn't completely voids a contract. For instance the employer can still fight it by justifying a necessity for them to have a longer period, or convincing a court the contract had enough provisions to make it a reasonable clause.
It would be a huge PITA on both sides though, I don't see many companies wanting that much trouble just for a single employee trying to leave the boat.
[0] https://jsite.mhlw.go.jp/miyagi-roudoukyoku/library/miyagi-r...
Why not? Are they obscene somehow?
If the person was leaving because they accepted an offer from another employer, being on two payrolls simultaneously might also be a problem.
But companies bullying employees on resignation seems to be a bigger issue than I thought.
However I would say that IMO it's another case of foreigners buzzing by depicting boring and common stuff under a "weird Japan" light.
Shitty companies manipulating employees to stop them from resigning is something that exists in any country. And this escalating to the labor authorities or going through a lawyer is not a rare thing anywhere either.
It happens more frequently in Japan because the culture of not being confrontational is strong. The fact that lawyers can afford to specialize in this matter alone is just a logical result of the larger number of customers.
EDIT: I also want to add this: if you have been in a company for a while, you are eventually going to see or hear about how resignation is handled for other employees. If you want to quit and already know that the company is going to harrass you and make your life hell, is it so weird to save your time and mental health to delegate all of that to a dedicated professional?
I think foreign workers are more exploited in general but outside of the cities it is way harder to escape such employers.
I have never heard of it in the US. I’m sure some examples exist but I’d be really unpleasantly surprised if it’s a major social issue here.
IMO, it's an tortured example of Hanlons Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I see tons of shitty stuff roll downwards to employees in US companies, but I never see the kind of competence at the upper levels to pull off the kind of manipulation implied here. It's just negligence, ignorance, and dysfunctionality that tends to screw us yanks at the bottom.
Pretty universally illegal. California doesn't have noncompete clauses at all. Texas, the state I'm most familiar with, doesn't allow them to be enforced except for skills that are proprietary to an employer, .e.g., supporting specific software in a specific way or something. Pretty sure most states that have them are the same. Making burgers isn't going to do it, and nobody would sue you over it anyway, they'd sue the new employer whose lawyers will know better.
I have had an employer try to get me to sign an illegal noncompete before, but that was because it was a small employer who didn't know the law. When I quit I politely informed him that it was unenforceable. He didn't try. That doesn't mean employers who know better don't try to intimidate employees, but they could just as easily threaten to break your kneecaps. Probably they won't.
It is? In what other countries are we talking about here where a company escalates to the labor authorities to prevent you from quitting? Usually this kind of thing is reserved to harass visa holders, not native workers.
Using the agency means you do a 10 minute phone call and that's it. You don't even have to work your remaining days or talk to the company ever again. The agencies seem to have some legal powers that a normal person doesn't, or at least in reality they get results much faster and aren't allowed to screw around.
What did amuse me is there's a discount if you use them multiple times.
I suspect the power that they have is actually knowing the law. Also by hiring one the employee has shown they are willing to hire a lawyer, so the employer can't bluff with legal threats. And very few employees are actually going to be worth the trouble to sue
This was at a Major Electronics Vendor that is known internationally and who produces... "Entertainment devices".
He walked up to his boss, handed his letter of resignation in, and was told "No, you're too critical to this project, I can't accept this." His response was to say "If I'm too critical to this project then you have failed in your duties as a manager, and it would be very inconvenient for you to have to admit that, so you're going to let me go or I'll make it Very Inconvenient for you by telling the whole team you think they're idiots and that the foreigner is the only reason this release will succeed."
He then didn't show up for a month (new job gave him enough time to take a nice, lengthy 3-month vacation to Korea and back) and his old boss kept calling and sms'ing him... On a number he only used for that job.
The way the culture works there’s no way for the managers to be anything but unfailingly polite to an external party that calls to resign on behalf of the employee.
If only they were in a position to do something about it.
I'd guess it's just guilt and shame?
There are procedures to get around this stuff but since it's not the common case, when it does happen suddenly you get to learn about labor law.
I think anywhere in the world, when there is active antagonism causing bureaucracy to not be able to move forward, most people freeze up like a deer caught in headlights. Turns out that being a sociopath can be quite helpful for exploiting workers!
Sociopathy is no more a single thing than cancer or the common cold are single things. Even less so, because it is only defined by subjective interpretation of outward symptoms.
However, I thought sociopathy was pretty well-defined as having a complete lack of empathy.
"Lack of empathy" can easily be interpreted in many ways. What you are upset about are the actions of those you accuse of not having empathy. You think that killing anyone without empathy is the solution. You clearly have no empathy for those without empathy.
You are the monster you fought against.
I don't see why that's inevitable? You're not explaining the reasoning that got you there.
> those you accuse of not having empathy
"If we had a reliable list of people without empathy, anyone on that list would not have empathy." is not an accusation, it's a truism.
> You clearly have no empathy [...] You are the monster you fought against.
This might be the worst internet diagnosis I've ever seen.
This inherent contradiction is evidence enough that no sufficiently objective metric may distinguish "sociopath" from "not-sociopath". The power offered is great enough that it would be immediately abused.
EDIT: Come to think of it I'm actually not 100% sure about the legality of this, but they sure try it!
In some ways they are. Notably Japan has no concept of constructive dismissal, and companies have a pretty broad right to assign work and even to assign someone to work at a faraway office. There may be some anti-harassment law on the books, but it's very hard to get anything recognised under it, and if someone is just constantly assigned bad work, or no work, they have very little recourse.
And even if you could win a lawsuit, Japan doesn't do punitive damages or damages for emotional distress. So you'd be able to claim, maybe, lost wages for your time out of work, and... that's probably it.
But the again - these agencies might be solving an entirely different problem.
To me, it seems like if you were designing a brand new society optimized only to maximize the countries GDP, you'd implement the Japanese model - employees who never leave their employers, extremely long work hours and mandatory after work social activities.
China, Japan and SK have all effectively implemented a version of this and their economic growth post WWII has been nothing short of remarkable (China was poorer than Sub Saharan Africa in the 50's).
Obviously, you could say this has not been going very well for Japan more recently but I'd argue the main drawback to this paradigm is the inevitable population implosion.
Nowadays, women want to have more meaning in their lives than just being married to some guy they barely know or care about and raising his kids as some kind of servant with 2nd-class citizen rights. This isn't just in Japan, it's in every developed nation. The result of this is a far lower birthrate, so you can't have a super-high GDP for too long; you get a boost at the beginning because nearly 100% of adults can now contribute to GDP, but it burns out in a few decades because there's no one to replace them.
Societies need to come up with a new model.
As is, women regularly delayed having children until they're near or past their fertility window, if they want children at all. In our current society, it's difficult to both have a career and be a mother.
If scientists could come up with a way of making women much more fertile up to, say, age 60 (in an affordable and reliable way I mean, current treatments are unreliable and horrifically expensive), I wonder what effect this would have on the birth rate.
Better would be to just make things easier for parents. Cheap or free childcare, for one thing.
Nobody wants to hear that these days, if they ever did.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/jap....
You can describe that as ‘recently’, but it’s an entire generation.
Of course you'll copy the US's model. In terms of GDP, the US has been doing so much better than the rest of the world in the last several decades.
I think it's a compelling story to see Japan, the Asian Tigers (two of them former colonies of Japan, the other two former British colonies) and China as having the same growth story, but I don't think it's the same story in all of these places. Outside commentators love to bring up Confucianism, but Confucianism (just like Christianity or Buddhism) is a pretty ancient philosophy and religion that have seen many iterations and has taken many different, perhaps even contradictory shapes and forms over the years. A certain version of it was extremely influential in Japan during the Edo period, but a modern Japanese would probably cite Confucius directly less than a culturally Chinese person would do. And it's certainly an influence in Japan, but the culture is just so different than China, which had its own local influences (including decades of Communism and a not-so-minor Cultural Revolution which targeted the "Four Olds").
I think the best explanation is that all of these countries (in their respective growth period!) had a good degree of political stability and achieved the necessary level of education. They all exercised government guidance through export-oriented policies, but left enough leeway for private companies to choose their own way (in other words, a heavy dose of government meddling that would make neoliberals blush, but not a full-on command economy). And most of all, the timing was right. These countries started to grow their industry (or rebuild it and re-orient it towards export in Japan's case) while fertility was still high and they were relatively poorer than the countries which bought up their goods. And of course, this all happened while world was rapidly globalizing.
It's easy to miss the complex factors involved and recommend the export-oriented playbook to countries where it won't fit, or to think that the same playbook would work forever. It's also easy to blame culture when the things fail. Within Japan, you'd find many commentators who believe the attitudes during the Showa era (1926-1989) were different and the current generation is just incapable of hard work, innovation or whatever else.
But from all I've read and heard about Showa era businesses, they were far less efficient than current Japanese businesses are. The businesses culture was probably probably less risk-averse, but that aversion is itself partly the result of decades of having a somewhat stagnant economy. My pet theory is that Japan was successful during its economic miracle period DESPITE the vast inefficiencies of its corporate culture. It only had western economies to compete with (the Asian Tigers hadn't started to roar yet and China was still far away from industrialization) and the wages in Japan were initially far lower than in the US. From various productivity metrics inefficiencies in other Western countries probably weren't much different back then (this tracks, since it all happened before the mass digitization of the workplace and government which Japan was late to). and despite management, office work and sales practices being inefficient, Japanese companies (most famously Toyota) have developed innovative methods for increasing efficiency and quality on the factory floor.
Fast forward to the 1990s, and Japan is seeing fierce competition from other cheaper producers on many products even before the baby boomer generation is facing retirement with a shrinking population. During that period rich economies are improving their productivity, while poorer economies can just undercut prices due to cheaper labor. Toyota's innovative manufacturing methods are getting adopted outside Japan as well. Japan still leads in places where it has technology advantages or even just a brand or market capture, but in general competition just becomes a lot harder.
At this point, mature economies can only do so much. No matter what the government and individual corporations do, we cannot expect anything close to the growth rates of the 1950s-1970s again. But inefficiencies are clearly hurting Japanese businesses.
Quitting a job has no complex moving parts, and most corporation will deal with it with minimal paperwork (you really only need to prove you gave them your resignation. An email reply would be enough legally).
The issues these new graduates (the source of the TFA is MyNavi, which is new graduate centric) are facing are arbitrary, purposefuly set to make their life harder.
Meanwhile American software companies and employees are both infamously disloyal and have done quite well.
It can also be true that the work culture in Japan stymies effective modern software development. I've heard anecdotes to this effect but it doesn't seem like something you could easily measure.
I don't necessarily think it's any better or any worse than western culture. My perspective is "it just has different failure modes".
From the moment you are born you are taught to care about what and how others think and feel about you and your conduct. If it's not your social peers, it's the literal Sun ("Otentou-sama") looking down upon you and judging your every single moment. If you shame yourself, you also bring shame upon your family and your ancestors both living and dead.
To be clear: This does work, and most Japanese are happy to serve society rather than feel compelled to do so at threat of cancellation. There are also benefits for the compliant, namely in the form of social safety nets both legal and social to ensure a minimum standard of living.
Japanese expats are a particular bunch, they left Japan because they couldn't stand the shaming and strict adherence to social codes. A kind of "you can't fire me if I quit" response.
Cultures are never just dysfunctional; there are usually a complicated set of compensations that makes the dysfunction more bearable. I'm curious how that works.
The compensation that makes the dysfunction more bearable is the culture of "gaman" which is deeply, deeply ingrained from a young age. It's normal for them to just suck it up and tolerate shit they don't like. It's a way of life. For everything thing else there is "shou ga nai" which often translates to "it can't be helped" and many Westerners think it's just Japanese people giving up too easily and don't really get it, but it comes from the Buddhist philosophy of accepting things as they are.
Yes, japan is a whole different mentality, with a completely different set of values and social norms ( mostly focused on "don't show disrespect to others", and "don't embarrass yourself"). Traveling from japan to the US/Hawaii was probably where i experienced the largest culture shock (and not in a flattering way for americans). It felt like going from civilization to barbaric lands.
On the other hand i can see why some japanese people can't handle that much pressure on their everyday behavior and prefer the western mentality at some point in their life.
People don't always do what's in their best interest. People talk to the police without a lawyer all the time. People sign away their rights just because they don't want to push back on things. It takes guts to stand up for yourself.
> "I can't quit the job. If I say I'm going to quit, I'll be threatened that I will have to pay damages for quitting."
They say 16.6% of people who changed jobs last year used these services, but only 23.2% of companies report having any employees use them. If 16.6% is correct, the % of companies number should be much higher, supposing companies have multiple resignations per year.
The method for the first number on how they found their respondents is described just as "internet survey," with no further info. There are a lot of ways to do this that would over-sample people who use these services.
上半期（2024年1月～6月）に退職代行サービスを利用して退職した人がいた企業は23.2％だった。
> "上半期（2024年1月～6月）に退職代行サービスを利用して退職した人がいた企業は23.2％だった。また、過去の退職代行利用者の実績を年度別に聞くと、2021年は16.3％、2022年は19.5％、2023年は19.9％"
These seem like full-year numbers, but they're much lower than what I'd expect if 23.2% is the half-year number — implying a huge jump in 2024?
The resignation agency service was widely reported in Japanese media in the first half of this year, which made its existence known to the public. This trend can also be confirmed on Google Trends[1].
In fact, the representative of 退職代行モームリ (Taishoku-daikō Mōmuri), the largest resignation agency company, stated in an interview that the number of users during this year's onboarding season was ten times that of last year[2].
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
Sounds legit.
So, not that much different mindset than a US startup founder who takes 70% equity, while offering the first hire 0.5% to 2% in options (vesting over 4 years, with exercise rules that further discourage ever getting any equity at all)?
(Edit: Fastest downvoting I've ever seen on HN. :)
That's basically their mindset.
I can guess that maybe it’s a well-known cultural thing that only prevents people of this culture to think about leaving. A sort of a group control thing.
So you click here and there in the comfort of your home, insert your card, enter pin and done.