SNA (Tokyo) — The Covid pandemic has led many foreign workers to desert their places of employment in Japan, and some of them have become runaway workers and even illegal overstayers.

This runaway worker phenomenon appears to be particularly common among participants in the notorious Technical Intern Training Program, who are especially vulnerable to poor work conditions and isolation from ordinary social protections. The Covid pandemic seems to have exacerbated an already difficult situation for these foreign workers, and more of them have slipped from legal employment into even more precarious circumstances.

With poor Japanese language skills and a lack of access to legal counsel, some of these workers run away from their original places of work, or have been laid off by their Japanese employers due to the pandemic downturn. Some of them became visa overstayers as international travel links tightened.

According to the Ministry of Justice, of the roughly 32,000 technical intern trainees who disappeared in the five years up to 2018, Vietnamese trainees accounted for the largest number, about 14,000, or 45% of the total. There’s every reason to believe that Vietnamese nationals remain the most affected minority today amidst the ongoing pandemic.

It is a combination of economic, structural, and policy factors that push many Vietnamese migrants in Japan to run away from their employers in Japan, hoping to secure higher wages and send larger remittances back home to their families.

Vietnamese participants in Japan’s technical intern program are routinely forced to pay extremely high costs to come to Japan in the first place, and thus many are required to take out loans from banks and moneylenders in order to do so.

After arriving in Japan, their employers usually force technical interns to utilize mandatory savings accounts for the entire duration of their contracts, a practice which makes the prompt repayment of debts incurred to cover migration-related costs difficult. While the apparent aim is to tie down the Vietnamese workers, strict policies of control can also backfire.

For example, NHK reported last year about the case of a young intern named Nguyen Van Thuong who arrived in Japan in April 2020 and initially worked at a construction company in Saitama Prefecture. He had intended to use the money he earned to build a house for his family, and to this end he borrowed about US$9,000 to make his work expedition from Vietnam to Japan.

He soon found, however, that he was caught in a trap. The salary he was making in Japan was insufficient to pay back the debt he had incurred.

In the interview, he stated that “I was told by my employer to sign a resignation letter agreeing to quit the company for personal reasons, without being told why. When I told them that I did not want to sign the form, they told me that I would have to go back to my country even if I did not sign the form, so I had no choice but to sign it.”

Nguyen chose to become a runaway in Japan. But he was ultimately one of the lucky ones. He gained help from an NGO and was able to get their support to intercede with the Ministry of Justice. He returned to legal work after a year of desperate unemployment.

Accounts agree that severe working conditions in Japan are the decisive factor pushing some trainees become illegal workers. Japanese employers know that they have a major power advantage over the “technical interns,” who are legally tied to their companies. It is said to be common that Vietnamese workers who complain about their work conditions are threatened with being sent back to their country, unable to pay back the debts they incurred in order to participate in the program or to support their families.

In practice, this often means the Vietnamese workers are subjected to long working hours (often with overtime pay illegally withheld), constant surveillance, and extreme efforts to control their movements and their lives in Japan.

The Asahi Shinbun reported on the case of a Vietnamese technical intern who came to Japan in 2016 and was employed to assemble greenhouses in Kumamoto Prefecture. Even though he worked ten hours a day, he was never paid the overtime wages that his Japanese colleagues were paid. He explained to the newspaper that he was forced to live in a container placed in a rice field and had to shower outdoors all year round. Even still, his Japanese employers deducted ¥20,000 (US$175) from his monthly salary for “rent.”

Runaway workers are also quite vulnerable, of course, operating under illegal work status. Many have complained of the stress of being deceived, being treated badly, and sometimes abused. However, some runaways also say that they prefer being “free agents” and being able to work together with their friends.

The Japanese government calls technical intern trainees who run away from their companies “disappeared persons” (shissosha) regardless of the reasons that they fled from their workplaces.  If their period of stay expires, or if they do any work other than the technical internship, they are classified as illegal workers (fuho shurosha).

Sometimes runaway interns are targeted by local and national campaigns aiming to hunt them down and deport them to their countries of origin. There are even instances when the authorities suggest that the interns have run away because they are tempted by “high wages” at other companies, even when the evidence is clear that the overwhelming majority are fleeing from harsh treatment.

Until they are better protected by labor unions and other supporters, runaway technical interns have little prospect of experiencing fair and legal treatment in Japan and to recover their human rights.

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