承前*1
HIROKO TABUCHI “Japan Training Program Is Said to Exploit Workers” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/business/global/21apprentice.html
既に少し前の記事ではあるが。日本の隠れた苦汗工としての外国人「研修生」を採り上げる。主に広島での取材。取り敢えず、一般的概況についての記述をメモしておく；
From across Asia, about 190,000 trainees — migrant workers in their late teens to early 30s — now toil in factories and farms in Japan. They have been brought to the country, in theory, to learn technical expertise under an international aid program started by the Japanese government in the 1990s.For businesses, the government-sponsored trainee program has offered a loophole to hiring foreign workers. But with little legal protection, the indentured work force is exposed to substandard, sometimes even deadly, working conditions, critics say.
Government records show that at least 127 of the trainees have died since 2005 — or one of about every 2,600 trainees, which experts say is a high death rate for young people who must pass stringent physicals to enter the program. Many deaths involved strokes or heart failure that worker rights groups attribute to the strain of excessive labor.
The Justice Ministry found more than 400 cases of mistreatment of trainees at companies across Japan in 2009, including failing to pay legal wages and exposing trainees to dangerous work conditions. This month, labor inspectors in central Japan ruled that a 31-year-old Chinese trainee, Jiang Xiaodong, had died from heart failure induced by overwork.
Under pressure by human rights groups and a string of court cases, the government has begun to address some of the program’s worst abuses. The United Nations has urged Japan to scrap it altogether.
After one year of training, during which the migrant workers receive subsistence pay below the minimum wage, trainees are allowed to work for two more years in their area of expertise at legal wage levels. But interviews with labor experts and a dozen trainees indicate that the foreign workers seldom achieve those pay rates.
