In which he considers legal action in 2019

So . . . at work . . .

My boss worked me three fifty hour weeks in a row. He did this because he insisted that my contract stipulated that I work 22 days a month, and does not consider weekly hours. So, this month, I looked at my schedule. 23 days. And so I checked my contract.
My contract stipulates that I work forty hours a week without specifying the number of days that I work in a month. This is . . . not was I was informed of.

Every month, I fill out my time sheet with the time that I’ve worked. I work nine hour days (every day except Wednesday) with a forty five minute break. Therefore, I always write my time as eight hours and fifteen minutes. Assuming I get a break, which I don’t always. But I usually do. Last Friday, for instance, I wrote down that I worked ten hours and forty five minutes. Two days I recorded as 7:30 because that’s how long I’d worked (due to odd scheduling). Damian crossed out all of my hours and rewrote them all as eight hours. He said that we get a one hour break, but that we can only choose forty five minutes of it. The rest is time that he assumes is spent throughout the day on non work activities including using the toilet.

I have never encountered this . . . ever. Not in America, not in China, not in Japan. I’m also fairly certain that this is illegal. Rather illegal. And I’m currently looking to get legal advice. I’ve e-mailed two prominent figures in Japanese legal journalism (no idea where to start) and I’m contacting my friends who have good English and the ability to help. If I don’t hear anything soon, I’m going to contact the labor relations board myself and see how much I can communicate. I don’t want to write down anything with my own hand that’s untrue.

I feel a bit like a whiner. And I don’t like the idea of complaining to a government agency, especially not without confronting my boss. However, I’m worried that if I complain to him before I file something official, that things could go very poorly for me. And, honestly, I wouldn’t even mind if I felt like I was a legitimate member of a team and not like a tube he was trying to scrape as much out of as he could. I’ve never complained about anything that I’ve ever been asked to do. I’ve never complained when I’ve worked through breaks. The only time I ever raised any objection was when I was exhausted after working my third fifty hour week in a row. I never feel like I’m being taken advantage of, no matter how hard I work, as long as a person makes me feel appreciated. Or at least treats me with respect. I don’t get that here. And so if he’s going to insist on everything he can possibly get from me, I think that it’s fair to insist on my full legal rights. Is this unreasonable?

(On a side note, I just got a reply from one of the e-mails that I sent to a Japan Times writer).

The other thing is Power Harassment. It’s a problem in Japan, and they are passing laws that are ever harsher to try to prevent bosses from being awful to their subordinates. My boss is . . . difficult to work for. He regularly makes my older coworker cry. He is incredibly demeaning and accusatory. However, yesterday, he did something that may have crossed a line (at least legally) and had a great many witnesses.

Yesterday was an “office day”, where we did general work and prep around the school. Lately, we’ve been having a lot of rain (generally scattered) because we just barely missed a typhoon. Well, there was a cheap corrugated plastic lid that I’d cut to size for a shelf outside. It had utterly disintegrated under the heat and the wet and having heavy objects put on it. So I was told to remove it, and to make a new one. Which I did during a sunny spell.
The plastic exploded under any pressure. It would crumble apart whenever attempting to pick it up, or to move it, or to change it in any way. It also semi dissolved as it came in contact with water and bonded to anything that it came in contact with.
After getting frustrated with me, he told me to clean that up. I told him that I’d tried, but that there was no possible tool that we could use for that job, but that if we waited for morning (and things to dry) we could probably sweep it up (and, as I was going to be there early anyway, I’d be able to pick it up even if that weren’t the case).
Well, he said to do it. He had been incredibly frustrated by how long it had taken me to make a document earlier (the cheap office computer kept freezing up), and so I told him that the only way to clean up the tiny (think an eighth of the size of your pinky nail) pieces of plastic embedded in the rubber ground covering that he has outside was to pick up the hundreds of pieces by hand. In the muck and the yuck and the rain. He told me to do it.
And . . . I did it. And I didn’t complain. Possibly an hour later, he came out to stare down at me and look disdainful about how long it was taking. He also criticized my use of an umbrella (it had stopped raining about a minute before he arrived). Then, to show me that he could do it better, he took a broom and dragged it across some cement with plastic bits on it.
Unsurprisingly, upon contact with the broom, the big pieces (relatively easy to get by hand) shattered into dozens of tiny pieces and bonded with the cement.
Without a word, he walked back indoors.
My older co-worker told me, “That’s just his way of showing people who is boss.”

What makes this event interesting is that, due to miscommunication and scheduling issues, three families all showed up to drop their kids off for a class which wasn’t scheduled (usually we have Wednesday classes, we didn’t this week). And all of them saw me. And one mother specifically commented on how hard and miserable what I was doing was.

So . . . it was a dirty job. Somebody had to do it. I get it. But it was a power trip. It was him venting his frustrations on me by making me do something that he knew would be miserable, tedious, and unpleasant.

The joke is on him.

I think that the other teachers were jealous. After all, I was outside in the rain. They were inside. With him.