They treated us like animals. I thought I had seen the worst working conditions possible during my time in Haiti.
But the two years I spent working for the Koreans showed me that I lacked a great deal of perspective regarding just how poorly employees can be treated.
And they treated their visiting interns even worse. Students would fly in from Korea and rotate in/out every six months. Those kids were put through the wringer.
Knowing what life was like here since he went to undergrad here, it was an easy choice for him to come back to the US.
But from what I've heard, they have trouble adapting to new data (they _can_ do it in real emergency, but actively avoid taking initiative), hide issues and overall are very rigid and show almost no improvisation skills, all of which is a problem in high stress, fast-changing environment like oil rigs.
For example, TSMC is facing similar hurdles trying to expand semicon manufacturing in the US [0].
Even though SK, JP, TW, and Israel are all developed countries now, the developing country mentality still persists because their transition was relatively recent (a generation or less ago), and a lot of labor management and regulations is stuck in the old school era.
At least in the EU, the recently developed (eg. Czechia) and developing countries (eg. Bulgaria) still have some labor frameworks to kinda follow and some kind of recourse - at least for white collar work.
In Korean companies, the work culture is still stuck in the 90s era IB mentality, as a lot of management are much older and started their careers when chauvanism, racism, functional alcoholism, power politics, overwork, etc was still the norm.
Tbf, SK was still a developing country until 10-15ish years ago.
One of the most memorable examples of not being treated like a human was when a coworker of mine wished to take one hour off in order to see his daughter graduate from high school. He had 4 kids at one time. But he lost one to cancer and two others to gang violence. He put in a time off request more than 5 months in advance so he could see his only remaining child graduate.
They denied his request. On the day of the graduation he clocked out and went to the graduation. He was gone maybe 35 minutes total. He saw his daughter walk across the stage and then he returned to work. They were waiting for him at the time clock and fired him.
When it comes to the interns, I saw a lot of yelling, grabbing by the arms while admonishing, and making them work without meals. All of the full time Korean employees had their lunch catered every day. The interns weren't allowed to eat with the full time employees and they weren't allowed to take any kind of meal breaks at all as for as I know.
I'm sure there was much more that went on behind closed doors, but seeing grown men grab 19 year old girls by their arms and shake them while yelling at them was pretty enlightening.
I hope they can get their decade old humanoid robot research fast enough to production, otherwise i really don't see how they can provide for their population while having to care for 35% to 40% of the population that is over 64.
And since it does not look like it, the realization that migrants are not sub humans and actually quite value will hit hard.
On the topic of this "intern" scheme, I've seen a couple of NHK documentaries on it in the past year or two so it's definitely in the public consciousness now - although I get the impression the response it's got hasn't matched the outrage I would have hoped for. From what I saw a "technical intern" is another name for a farm/factory labourer, which is almost beyond parody.
In February the "technical intern" program was abolished and a new system set up in its place. I'm doubtful it will be much better, but I guess we'll find out eventually.
They already did that - it was a core plank of Abenomics.
> raise the retirement age to 70+
Highly unlikely. It would be politically untenable and the LDP is dependent on a coalition with Komeito, which is heavily in favor of the welfare state.
> I'm doubtful it will be much better, but I guess we'll find out eventually
It won't get better. Same abuse but with a different name.
People go on and on about racism in America, but I have generally found that those people have absolutely no fucking idea what racism in a society actually looks like. You wanna see racism? Go be a minority in any country with a 90% majority race/culture.
Edit: Invariably people need to confuse "Racism is a bigger issue in other countries than the US" with "Racism never existed in the US".
The USA was an apartheid country in the Jim Crow era. What could be more racist than segregation?
Jim Crow apartheid was so deeply pervasive that WW2 soldiers blood transfusion packets were segregated, so a stricken white soldier wouldn't be tarnished with black blood. That's quite something when you're fighting against the Nazis.
It really depends on where you move to and where youre from.
Also, let's not sweep discrimination under the rug. It's ugly and wrong all around. Some places worse than others, but it's still bullshit and shouldn't be tolerated, especially when it comes to employment.
There's always the unspoken option, which is to not handle geriatric care well at all. Old people have been dying neglected and alone in JP for a while. When shit critically hits the fan, geriatric population will be either too senile to vote, or if they can vote, too weak to protest, and thus can be easily ignored as a bloc. Goal of cycling through disposable migrants to do shit jobs locals don't want to do is to keep value positive sectors crunching. IMO different dynamic when it's coming out of pockets of already squeezed tax base to take care of boomers. There'sgoing to be a lot of, you lived a long life, so sad, too bad, because good luck convincing ethnocentric youth to take another L for the team by treating migrants better, the only social prestige pressed these days is knowing outsiders have it worse. Societies have no problem finding a way to be callous to poor, kids, women, minorities etc, they'll find a way to rationalize being incredibly callous to elders.
There is a recent Japanese Sci-Fi movie that came out at Cannes recently called Plan 75 [0] that touches on that option
Ofc, Japan is a democracy and old people vote.
Even if the LDP ruled for much of Japan's democratic history, it's still vulnerable to losing power due to public anger (eg. Kishida's corruption scandal).
Imagine how angrier Japanese voters would be with horrible geriatric care.
Aaaaaaand cue Roujin Z
I recommend watching it sometime.
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qU2xaRBeFiU&embeds_referring_e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Trembling_(film)?wpro...
