Prayer Time Dispute

[Mulboyne]

A recent Asahi article (Japanese) reported that Fast Retailing, who run the Uniqlo brand, intends to increase its foreign intake of graduate trainees over the next couple of years to support provide management support for their overseas expansion. As it is, around half of this year's intake of 200 comprised Chinese, Korean and other nationalities but the company expects to raise this ratio to two thirds and increase hiring to around 600 next year and 1000 in 2012. Uniqlo says that ultimately they want these people to be capable of managing domestic stores and not just overseas operations. Following on from the news that internet retailer Rakuten plans to conduct board meetings in English, the press has once again been considering some of the challenges facing Japanese companies.

J-Cast has a piece today (Japanese) from a factory manager for a mid-sized manufacturer. He says that around 40% of his workforce is now made up of foreigners and one particular issue has caused a rift. Many of the overseas workers stop for prayers. On one occasion, a local worker pointed out that they had an important deadline to meet and asked his colleagues to postpone their prayers until they had finished the job. They refused and there was a good deal of bitterness at the incident.

The manager points out that it wasn't a question of his Japanese employees objecting to religious practices but more that they felt a sense of unfairness about having to continue working while the others took a break. The manager said that he thought about subtracting wages so he could tell the others that the prayer breaks were unpaid but the foreign workers pointed out that Japanese workers took regular cigarette breaks without losing any pay. The manager doesn't go into any detail about how he resolved the issue but he suggests that Japanese companies are going to have to deal with the fact that they don't have a homogenous workforce any longer and can't afford to assume that they will get the same responses from their non-Japanese employees.

[Samurai_Jerk]

The best way to deal with that problem is to send those ragheads back to where they came from: Blighty

[Mike Oxlong]

I had an employer that gave a couple extra days off over the New Years break to non-smokers, as they weren't absent from their desks for 10-15 minutes every hour over an eight-hour shift. Not that those couple days made up for all the extra time off the smokers got, but it sure was nice at that time of year.

[Mulboyne]

Just noticed Japan Today decided to translate part of the same article.