Japan sets guidelines to protect foreign trainee workers

Japan on Wednesday introduced new guidelines to protect foreign trainees amid concern that workers from developing countries were being exploited due to a shortage of low-cost labour.
Japan has strict restrictions on immigration, but companies have used a loophole under which people from developing countries can come for "training" as part of Tokyo's foreign assistance.
The US State Department in its latest annual report on human trafficking urged reforms to Japan's "trainee" system, saying that for some foreigners it amounted to forced labour.
Japan's justice ministry said it was revising its guidelines for accepting foreign trainees and interns for the first time since it introduced the regulations in 1999.
Under the new guidelines, it is illegal for companies or organisations to confiscate foreign trainees' passports or alien registration cards, the immigration office said in a statement.
It also forbade companies from controlling trainees' movements after hours or transferring them against their will to other companies.
"In recent years, the number of cases has been increasing in which foreign trainees and technical interns have fallen victim as they were treated inappropriately as low-cost labour," the statement said.
Punishments for companies that violate the revised guidelines include a three-year ban on taking further foreign trainees.
The number of foreign trainees entering Japan in 2006 hit a record high of 93,000, largely from developing Asian nations. A record 229 organisations or companies were accused of mistreating foreign trainees, the ministry said.
Small and mid-sized companies in particular have complained of a shortage of low-skill labour in Japan, whose economy is steadily recovering from recession in the 1990s.
Japan has one of the world's lowest birth-rates. In the year to March 2006, Japan's population shrank for the first time in peacetime as many young people put off starting families.
Japan has rejected proposals to allow wide-scale unskilled immigration, with the country thinking of itself as ethnically homogeneous.