I'm not sure exactly what went down, but a couple of days before I was supposed to leave Tokyo for DC, I got an email from CSWA folks about some Chinese women who had been hired through a subcontracting firm to work for a medical laundry in Japan. They eventually came out in mid-September against their company, technoclean, for stealing their wages and for exposing them to long hours of hard labor with no protection against the toxic waste resulting from the laundry. My mission was to go out and meet the women, but all I had was a Chinese article and the name of the journalist who wrote it up.
For those of you who can read Chinese, I think you can read about it here: http://blog.ifeng.com/article/1697213.html
Nevertheless, it was exciting to hear about workers standing up in Japan. The people I stayed with in Tokyo both had some interesting stories about how they - white european men with work permits - had been blackmailed and exploited by their Japanese bosses/the Japanese immigrant worker system. Apparently, A's boss wanted A to work for no pay and threatened to have A's friend Y fired if A did not comply. Fortunately, Y's Japanese boss did not listen to A's boss who tried to cast suspicion on Y by framing him as a sketchy foreigner ("gaijin"), but A never got paid in the end.
Another example of how bosses use immigration status and racism to screw over workers, even white male workers in a white supremacist system... A lot of people (like myself, who used to) think that being white in Japan excused you from a lot of the oppression and exploitation against people of color. This is of course true to a certain extent, but white folks are by no means exempt from exploitation - they are clearly tokenized and although they have access to different kinds of jobs than say a Latino worker or a black Brazilian worker, they are still underpaid, harassed by the cops and denied housing, etc etc.
For those of you who can read Chinese, I think you can read about it here: http://blog.ifeng.com/article/1697213.html
Nevertheless, it was exciting to hear about workers standing up in Japan. The people I stayed with in Tokyo both had some interesting stories about how they - white european men with work permits - had been blackmailed and exploited by their Japanese bosses/the Japanese immigrant worker system. Apparently, A's boss wanted A to work for no pay and threatened to have A's friend Y fired if A did not comply. Fortunately, Y's Japanese boss did not listen to A's boss who tried to cast suspicion on Y by framing him as a sketchy foreigner ("gaijin"), but A never got paid in the end.
Another example of how bosses use immigration status and racism to screw over workers, even white male workers in a white supremacist system... A lot of people (like myself, who used to) think that being white in Japan excused you from a lot of the oppression and exploitation against people of color. This is of course true to a certain extent, but white folks are by no means exempt from exploitation - they are clearly tokenized and although they have access to different kinds of jobs than say a Latino worker or a black Brazilian worker, they are still underpaid, harassed by the cops and denied housing, etc etc.
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