[/floatl]A Chinese trainee intern is suing his construction company employee for a work-related injury he sustained last year. The man arrived in Japan in 2006 under the much-criticized trainee worker scheme and suffered the injury while working on a housing project in Toyama prefecture. He was operating a brick cutter when a shard caught him in the eye. Momentarily distracted, he slipped and lost the thumb on his left hand in the cutter. A Nagano workers' compensation board awarded him a one-time payment of 1.6 million yen in a decision handed down in March this year but the man has decided to seek 29 million from his employer. Shoichi Ibusuki, chairman of a national lawyers association which investigates abuses of the foreign trainee scheme, says that disputes over low or unpaid wages are common but he cannot recall a case involving injury compensation. A local support group says it is certainly the first within the prefecture. The plaintiff argues that he was unsupervised on the equipment and had no safety goggles. The president of the construction company maintains that a supervisor was onsite and making periodic rounds and says that safety goggles were available but the man did not use them for which he must accept responsibility.
Japanese story here.
