Bandai Namco has reportedly turned to the unspoken Japanese tradition of layoff-by-boredom by stuffing unwanted employees into oidashi beya, or “expulsion rooms.”
Employees banished reassigned to oidashi beya are left to do nothing, or given menial tasks at best. According to Bloomberg’s unnamed insider sources, Bandai Namco has moved around 200 of its 1,300 person team to these rooms in recent months.
The goal of sticking someone in an expulsion room is to literally bore or shame them into quitting, and Bloomberg’s sources claim it has worked on around half the people Bandai Namco has stuck in there so far.
That sounds like a set of rules that could create, but in reality it’s actually hard for them to pull it off. If you violate some of the rules, like if you’re sitting in a room with nothing to do and then you pull out your phone and start texting, they could try to reprimand you and start the ball rolling on firing you. But then you get the union involved, and then you can gather evidence about the reasonableness of their effort to fire you. At some point it will go before a judge and the judge will ask your boss why they have to block you from having a cell phone if you were just sitting there doing nothing. When your boss can’t answer, then you will win your lawsuit.
In other words, companies that try this tactic have to be very careful about exactly how the implement it, because labor law has a surprisingly large number of protections.
I mean, they probably wouldn’t bother doing this if the legal framework wouldn’t make this a viable strategy. If it is culturally and legally difficult to fire your employees it makes “sense” to instead bore them into quitting, ethical concerns aside.
Yes, of course some companies are using it. That’s what the article is about. The point I’m making, and it matters to employees in Japan, is that if employers want to use this strategy and avoid losing lawsuits, they have to be very careful about exactly what they do. Many judges have and continue to side with employees over employers. But filing lawsuits is expensive and time-consuming, and somewhat risky financially because you might lose, so sometimes companies get away with these shady tactics.
And depending on how much money you were making, you might just be better off using a couple of months of that boring time to prepare your resume and apply to other jobs, and then quit once you’ve lined one up.
Anyway, if your boss does this to you, and you go to your union and that doesn’t work, and you eventually hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit against them, the judge is going to ask the company to justify all of the decisions they made. If the company says that they’re trying to convince the employee to quit out of boredom, you will win your lawsuit. If the company can provide some kind of plausible explanation for the adjustment in the duties that they’re asking you to do, the specific facts are going to come into play, and you might win or lose, depending on them.
I didn’t miss your point, mine was just that a global corporation will not commit to doing this without the realistic expectation that it will work out for them. Perhaps Japan has less or no unions, perhaps the legal system does not provide for the employees suing them on the basis of “you made my job deliberately boring”. Just that especially a large corp such as this will not do this unless they crunched the numbers and it has been calculated this is the cheapest way towards their objective.