For some of Japan's lonely workers, COVID-19 brings a homecoming

TOKYO - After four years spent working and living alone, far from his family and friends, Tsuyoshi Tatebayashi packed his bags at the end of March and returned, at last, to his wife and two daughters.

Like hundreds of thousands of other white-collar workers, the 44-year-old IT engineer had been on a solo assignment, known as "tanshin funin", and wasn't expecting to return to his family so soon.

But as the COVID-19 pandemic dragged on, his employer, Fujitsu, decided to bring its far-flung workers home, becoming one of Japan's first big firms to make a start in ending the long-established practice.

Solo assignments have been a regular duty for white collar workers since at least Japan's recovery from wartime devastation, becoming a crucial step in career progression despite their unpopularity among many workers.

"If it can be helped, I don't want to have to go on a solo assignment again," Tatebayashi said from his home in Fukuoka, around 1,000 km (600 miles) from his work base near Tokyo. Tatebayashi was one of 4,000 solo workers at the IT consulting and equipment maker.

Manabu Morikawa, a Fujitsu personnel manager, said technology has made remote work possible and ending the unpopular practice may help Fujitsu hire workers.

"There had been discussion in the past about people working away from their families, but COVID-19 provided the impetus for change," Morikawa said.

Snack maker Calbee Inc is another scrapping the practice, last year abolishing most solo assignments.

Solo workers at companies where teleworking has become a norm for all employees are also going home. At some, including Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings and beverage maker Kirin Holdings, that change may be permanent.

"There are cases where employees go back to where their families are," said Russell Roll, a spokesman for Kirin, adding pandemic work-at-home measures were open ended.

Mitsubishi Chemical's new head office in Tokyo will only have enough desks for 60% of employees assigned there.

For the entire system to change, however, banks such as Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, which need to staff extensive branch networks, and major manufacturers such as Toyota Motor Corp, would have to end the practice as well.

"Transfers are a positive step from viewpoint of the outcome by both matching the right person for the right job at the company and the career development of the employee," Toyota spokeswoman, Shiori Hashimoto said.

Toyota is keeping solo assignments but has also expanded work at home for all employees, she added.

An spokesman at MUFG, which is sticking with solo assignments, declined to comment when asked about their merit.

UNPOPULAR

Firms move people every few years to nurture managers with broad experience and also as a way to ensure supplier relationships don't encourage fraud, said Rochelle Kopp, the founder of consulting firm Japan Intercultural.

"Under Japanese labour law, if you are a permanent employee, refusing a job transfer or other job assignment is the same as saying that you are quitting," said Kopp. "It's so commonplace that people just think it's normal."

Many solo workers are middle-aged men who transfer alone to avoid disrupting family life.

Researchers at Ritsumeikan University, using census data and government surveys, estimate there may be as many as 1 million solo workers.

On average, solo workers get an allowance of 47,000 yen ($432) a month to cover housing costs and a trips homes, according to the labour ministry.

But more than two-thirds of 3,131 respondents in a survey published by the Asahi newspaper last February described the assignments as unnecessary. Only 41 people said they were happy with them as they were.

"To get promoted, you have to do solo assignments, although it means missing out on seeing your children grow up," said a YouTuber, who identified himself as Nishigami.

Nishigami, who has been alone in Tokyo for three years working for an IT company, posts videos for first-time solo workers with advice on furnishing small apartments and living frugally.

BACK HOME

During his four year stint in Yokohama, Tatebayashi saw his family once every two months, even less when pandemic lockdowns curbed travel. Most other weekends he worked, hung out with Fujitsu colleagues or played computer games.

He chose to live alone because he had just bought a house in Fukuoka and didn't want to take his daughters, then six and 10, out of school or away from their grandparents nearby.

Japan's government has largely ignored solo workers in recent labour reforms that focus instead on curbing excessive overtime following several deaths from overwork, known as "karoshi".

Tatebayashi reckoned it will take a month or so for family life to return to normal in Fukuoka.

"My kids are happy about it because we can play together, but my wife says she'll find it hard to relax if I am around the house all the time," he said.

He and most other Fujitsu employees welcome the end of solo assignments, but according to personnel manager Morikawa it has posed a problem for a few of Fujitsu's long-term corporate nomads.

"They say that they no longer have rooms at home to go back to." (Reporting by Tim Kelly; additional reporting by Ritsuko Ando, Takashi Umekawa, Maki Shiraki; Editing by David Dolan and Lincoln Feast.)

-reuters-

Work from home, travel curbs: World's employers adapt to coronavirus

SAN FRANCISCO — At Facebook on Thursday, the questions from spooked employees came thick and fast.

The evening before, the social network had disclosed that a contractor in one of its Seattle offices had been diagnosed with the coronavirus and had said that all employees in that city should work from home until March 31.

Other Facebook employees, some of whom had recently traveled for work, soon began asking their managers and one another: Who was the contractor? Had that person been near them? And what did that mean for their work?

That same alarm has now spread through other companies around the world, despite escalating efforts by many of the firms to deal with disruptions from the coronavirus outbreak that started in China. Microsoft, Amazon, Ford Motor, CNN, Citigroup and Twitter have put employees through work-from-home drills, dusted off emergency-response plans and implemented increasingly stringent safety measures to protect their workers.

Even so, the coronavirus has moved faster than their preparations. Amazon said this week that two employees in Europe, who had been in Milan, were infected with the virus and that one employee at its Seattle headquarters had also tested positive for it. HSBC said on Thursday that an employee at its global headquarters in London had been diagnosed with the coronavirus. And AT&T said a retail employee at one of its stores in San Diego had also tested positive.

The challenges faced by workplaces have become a new front in the battle over the coronavirus, which has spawned more than 90,000 cases and more than 3,000 deaths around the world. While factories in China had already been closed by the outbreak and are now just ramping back up, global white-collar companies have rarely grappled with this scale of disruption — or the level of fear that has gripped workers.

“No one has a playbook for this,” said Dan Levin, who runs a small company outside Chicago, Cain Millwork, which makes furniture and wall paneling. He said he was planning to have some of his office employees work from home.

Many corporate memos, including those from HSBC and Facebook, now mention deep cleaning of office spaces and self-quarantining. Face-to-face job interviews have been all but banned by some firms, in favor of interviews conducted by teleconference.

At Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, near a cluster of coronavirus cases, employees swapped stories this week about the outbreak in internal chat rooms. In one online conversation on Wednesday, which was reviewed by The New York Times, a Microsoft employee wrote of a rumor that someone at headquarters had been infected.

“Could it be true?” he wrote. “FWIW,” he noted, the corporate emails telling employees to work from home “don’t mention that NO Microsoft employees had been infected.”

Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s chief spokesman, said the company was not aware of any verified cases in its workforce. He said Microsoft had tried to communicate clearly to its employees that “we are using the advice being given from local officials and public health officials.”

Inside Amazon, while some workers emailed each other about whether masks provide effective protection, many were scrambling to deal with business problems caused by the virus, according to four employees who were not authorized to speak publicly. Those included whether Amazon will have enough products to offer for Prime Day, its summer sale event, or have enough drivers to handle a surge in online grocery orders as the virus spreads.

The depth of employee anxiety has forced senior executives to take calming measures. Uber sent out a memo to staff on Wednesday saying it had formed an internal task force to handle its response to the virus, according to a copy viewed by The Times.

The ride-hailing company urged employees to have empathy for one another, to make “data-driven decisions” and restrict all nonessential travel until April. Uber added that it was working with an epidemiology consultant for further guidance.

“Much of this situation is new — not only for Uber, but for the world,” Andrew MacDonald, a senior vice president at Uber, wrote in the memo. “We won’t get everything right from the start.”

At its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Google also increased the amount of hand sanitizer available to employees, putting it in conference rooms and kitchen areas.

Other companies have tightened their travel restrictions. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase have said senior managers must approve international business trips. Walmart said on Thursday that employees could travel internationally only for “business-critical trips” and that it was limiting their travel to conferences and trade shows within the United States. And at CNN, the chief executive officer has begun personally vetting all intercontinental travel.

How companies have altered their response to the coronavirus over time has been evident with Twitter. On Sunday, the San Francisco social media company said it was suspending all nonessential travel for employees. A day later, it encouraged all of its employees — it has just over 5,000 — to work from home if they were able to.

Then on Thursday, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, appeared at a financial conference in San Francisco and said he was rethinking a plan he had formulated to work remotely from Africa for 3 to 6 months this year.

“Everything happening in the world, particularly with coronavirus, I have to reconsider what’s going on and what that means for me and for our company,” said Dorsey, who is also facing a challenge from activist investors.

The measures that companies are taking in response to the virus may shift workplace behavior over the long term. Telecommuting, which has been in and out of favor for decades, may become more ingrained. The use of digital tools for remote collaboration may also rise.

Yet in the near term, having workers stay home could be devastating for some smaller businesses. Robert Luft, who runs a company in Cincinnati that installs technology in health care facilities and distribution centers, said an outbreak that prevented his technicians from showing up to work would put his business in a precarious situation.

“If it’s unsafe for people to have them on site, that definitely impacts my business,” Luft said. “Unfortunately there isn’t any type of contingency plan.”

At Facebook, the company has been working on contingency plans for the impact of the coronavirus since January. Executives have tried to walk the line of hewing closely to advice from public health officials while trying not to cause a panic among employees, two Facebook employees said.

The social network quickly canceled its participation in a half-dozen events — from its annual F8 developer conference to its presence at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas — and has worked to use its products to help health experts study the spread of the virus. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a post this week the company was giving unlimited free Facebook ads to the World Health Organization to distribute information to users.

When one of its contractors was diagnosed with the virus on Wednesday, Facebook shut down two of its four offices in the greater Seattle area — in Bellevue and Redmond — for a deep cleaning, according to two employees.

An Amazon employee who was later diagnosed with the virus had also separately visited one of Facebook’s Seattle offices last month, prompting fresh concerns among employees. Facebook said it carried out “targeted deep cleaning and enhanced sanitation measures” at the office building that the Amazon employee had visited.

The company has also tried to keep its 44,000 employees sticking to business as usual. On Wednesday, it held a training session for managers on how to supervise teams of remote workers, the two employees said. And the social network was staying on course with a weekly question-and-answer session led by Zuckerberg on Thursday, which would be live streamed from Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

2020 The New York Times Company

McDonald's CEO's firing reflects rising scrutiny of work relationships

The #MeToo era has brought new scrutiny to a wide range of workplace misconduct — from discrimination to sexual harassment to assault — that was ignored, tolerated or even covered up in some corners of corporate America.

Now, the abrupt firing of McDonald’s chief executive, Steve Easterbrook, over the weekend highlights how even consensual relationships between managers and subordinates are drawing greater scrutiny.

Many of the circumstances of Easterbrook’s dismissal remain unclear, but McDonald’s said Sunday that its board had determined he engaged in a relationship that violated company policy. Its standards of business conduct prohibit employees with “a direct or indirect reporting relationship” from “dating or having a sexual relationship.”

“It is not appropriate to show favoritism or make business decisions based on emotions or friendships rather than on the best interests of the company,” the policy states.

In a regulatory filing Monday, McDonald’s said Easterbrook would receive 6 months of severance pay. That is likely to be around $675,000, or about half his base salary last year, according to the company’s 2018 severance guidelines. In the coming years, however, he stands to receive a total of more than $40 million in compensation, including stock options, according to an estimate by Equilar, an executive compensation consulting firm.

The mere fact that a successful executive was fired because of what McDonald’s described as a “recent consensual relationship” reflects changing attitudes about romance in the workplace, employment lawyers and other experts said.

“It’s a sign of the times,” said Wendy Patrick, a business ethics lecturer at San Diego State University. “You’re under a microscope in a way today that you never were before, simply because our awareness has been raised as to the problems that could potentially cause.”

Those problems include conflicts of interest, as well as the potential for a relationship that ends badly to result in harassment and retaliation.

Since announcing the leadership change on Sunday afternoon, McDonald’s has declined to reveal further details about Easterbrook’s relationship, including the employee’s position in the company, how the board found out about the relationship and how long it had lasted.

On Monday, McDonald’s human-resources chief, David Fairhurst, left the company. A spokeswoman for the fast-food chain wouldn’t say if the exit was linked to the investigation into Easterbrook’s relationship.

In recent years, other companies have taken similar actions penalizing workplace relationships. Last year, Intel’s chief executive, Brian Krzanich, resigned after the company discovered that he’d had a relationship with an employee — a violation of Intel’s “non-fraternization policy,” which applies to all managers.

“There has been a definite trend in the direction of written policies prohibiting romantic relationships between executives and their subordinates,” said Mark Spund, an employment lawyer in New York.

The policies can take a variety of forms. For example, many companies permit mid-level managers to have relationships with employees as long as they report the relationship. The rules for executives tend to be stricter.

“Companies in the aftermath of #MeToo have really understood that there’s an inherent power differential and what’s perceived to be consensual in the eyes of the executive may not be with the subordinate,” said Debra Katz, an employment attorney in Washington who has dealt extensively with workplace sexual harassment.

Still, sensitivity about workplace relationships — especially those involving a power imbalance — existed long before the #MeToo movement focused national attention on the misbehavior of men in power, shaking the entertainment, media and technology industries, among many others. In 2012, Best Buy’s chief executive, Brian Dunn, resigned after engaging in what the company described as “an extremely close personal relationship with a female employee.”

Both Dunn and the employee claimed that the relationship was not romantic. But an investigation by Best Buy found that Dunn had given the employee tickets to sporting events and concerts and that the pair had exchanged numerous phone calls and texts, some of which contained “messages expressing affection.”

And in 2005, Boeing’s chief executive, Harry Stonecipher, was forced to resign after he had a relationship with an employee.

The decision to fire Easterbrook may also reflect the specific pressures facing McDonald’s, which has been criticized recently for sexual harassment at the franchise level. Several Democratic presidential candidates this year have joined striking workers in demanding better protection from harassment, as well as union rights and a $15 minimum wage.

McDonald’s may want to “send a message to their employees that any kind of power-driven relationship is out of bounds,” said Eric Schiffer, an expert on reputation management.

2019 The New York Times Company

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Canada job numbers higher on cannabis boost

OTTAWA, Canada - Canada's pot legalization helped to significantly boost job numbers in November and push the unemployment rate down 0.2 percentage points to 5.6 percent -- the lowest level since 1976, the government statistical agency said on Friday.

In total, 94,000 jobs were added in the month. Gains were spread throughout most of the country, but led by Quebec and Alberta. Only the 4 eastern Maritimes provinces saw no changes, according to Statistics Canada.

It said the number of people employed in cannabis-related jobs -- including bud trimming -- in November rose 266 percent to 10,400, against the same period a year earlier.

Recreational-use cannabis was legalized on Oct. 17, creating an entirely new industry.

More than half of these jobs were in Ontario province, which has the largest concentration of licensed producers.

Pot workers were also paid slightly more than the national average salary, Can$29.58 (US$19.43) versus Can$27.03.

Overall, more people worked in the month in professional, scientific and technical services, which employed an additional 26,000 people; as well as in health care and social assistance; construction; business, building and other support services; transportation and warehousing; and agriculture. 

At the same time, fewer people were employed in information, culture, and recreation jobs.

The private sector increased hiring in the month, while there was little change in the public sector or in the number of self-employed individuals.

Employment increased for both core-aged women and men (aged 25 to 54), as well as for older Canadians aged 55 and over.

source: news.abs-cbn.com