Japan Accused of Literally Working Interns To Death

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The Japanese government has been accused of running slave labour working conditions after 27 foreign interns died in one year following months of working more than 16 hours a day.

The majority of the victims were in their 20s or 30s and were among an estimated 200,000 trainees from developing countries that are working here under the Japanese International Training Corporation Organisation.


The Japanese government has been accused of running slave labour working conditions after 27 foreign interns died in one year following months of working more than 16 hours a day.

The majority of the victims were in their 20s or 30s and were among an estimated 200,000 trainees from developing countries that are working here under the Japanese International Training Corporation Organisation.

Many were working 100 hours of overtime on top of regular working hours of 350 hours per month.

Human rights organisations and a group of lawyers representing dozens of interns seeking compensation from their former employers say

the state-run scheme has become open to abuses that make it a form of slave labour and that victims have few rights.

“Over the last year, there have been 27 technical interns who died in Japan, many of them from causes that can be linked to overwork,”

said Lila Abiko, a lawyer representing the family of a Chinese man who died in 2008 and a member of the Lawyers’ Network for Foreign Trainees.

“That figure may be an improvement on the 35 deaths in 2008, but it is still far too high and completely unnecessary,” she said.

Of the total, nine died of brain diseases or heart complaints, four died in industrial accidents, three committed suicide and four died in road accidents.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the remainder died of unknown causes.

Twenty-one of the dead were from China, three from Vietnam, two from the Philippines and one was from Indonesia.

A ministry official told local media that it was taking the situation “seriously” and that it would instruct firms not to permit such incidents to happen in the future.

Rights groups are not optimistic that companies hard-hit by the global recession will be willing to allow their interns to work fewer hours or pay them more,

although a labour standards bureau in Ibaraki Prefecture, north of Tokyo, has this week indicated that it will recognise the death of a Chinese man in June 2008 as having been caused by overwork.

The family of Jiang Xiaodong will be the first to receive a labour insurance payment, of about Y10 million (£75,000), since the scheme began in 2001, according to this story in the on-line version of the UK newspaper The Telegraph.

Jiang was 31 when he died of heart failure in his sleep in lodgings provided by metal processing company Fuji Denka Kogyo, in the city of Itako, Ibaraki Prefecture.

He had worked as many as 109 hours of overtime – on top of his 350 regular working hours – in the months before his death.

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