{"id":1221,"date":"2008-02-12T13:02:34","date_gmt":"2008-02-12T04:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=1221"},"modified":"2008-04-23T11:32:54","modified_gmt":"2008-04-23T02:32:54","slug":"mainichi-chinese-trainees-awarded-big-after-taking-exploitative-strawberry-farm-to-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=1221","title":{"rendered":"Mainichi:  Chinese Trainees awarded big after taking exploitative strawberry farm to court"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi Blog.  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=1018\">Update to an earlier story on this blog<\/a>.  Good news about Strawberry Fields.  You know the place where justice got real&#8230;  <\/p>\n<p>Congrats to the Trainees who didn&#8217;t just go home like good little disenfranchised Guest Workers, and managed to get the Japanese judiciary to establish deterrents to exploitative employers.  Arudou Debito<\/p>\n<p>============================<br \/>\n<b><i>Employees win suit against Tochigi farms for unpaid wages, unfair dismissals<br \/>\nMainichi Shinbun February 11, 2008<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/mdn.mainichi.jp\/national\/news\/20080211p2a00m0na009000c.html\">http:\/\/mdn.mainichi.jp\/national\/news\/20080211p2a00m0na009000c.html<\/a><br \/>\nCourtesy of Ben Shearon<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>TSUGA, Tochigi &#8212; A group of strawberry farmers will have to pay a combined 30 million yen in unpaid and overtime wages, and reinstate five Chinese trainees who were unfairly dismissed after losing a class action suit brought against them by their employees.<\/p>\n<p>The farmers have also acknowledged that they took away some of the trainees&#8217; passports and forced them to save their wages: which, if proved, would constitute an illegal act, barring the farmers from accepting future trainees, according to the Ministry of Justice.<\/p>\n<p>The trouble began when the Choboen strawberry farm in Tsuga dismissed five Chinese trainees in December last year because of a poor harvest, and attempted to force them to go back to their home country.<\/p>\n<p>The five joined 10 trainees at six other strawberry farms in demanding 52.25 million yen in unpaid wages and overtime allowances over the past three years.<\/p>\n<p>The owners of the seven farms have apologized for forcing the trainees to work for long hours and paying overtime allowances below the legal minimum. They agreed to pay a total of about 30 million yen to the 15, and Choboen retracted its dismissals.<br \/>\n\uff08Mainichi Japan\uff09 February 11, 2008<br \/>\nENDS\n<\/p>\n<p><!--453492a9f9ab1734c1fd8f1c850969cd--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mainichi: &#8220;A group of strawberry farmers will have to pay a combined 30 million yen in unpaid and overtime wages, and reinstate five Chinese trainees who were unfairly dismissed after losing a class action suit brought against them by their employees.&#8221;  Great precedent set against exploitation of NJ &#8220;guest labor&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,16,15,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-news","category-labor-issues","category-lawsuits","category-problematic-foreign-treatment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}