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kuchikomi

New service will tell your boss to 'Take this job and shove it' -- for a price

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Serving notice of resignation to an employer can be highly stressful. Even downright unpleasant in some cases. So like certain other unpleasant tasks, why not hire a professional stand-in to do it for you?

And indeed, services have sprung up to cater to people seeking to avoid such situations. They're called taishoku daiko saabisu (resignation stand-in services) and join a long list of similar, sometimes slightly shady substitute services that will drive your car home if you've had too much to drink, assign faux "company managers" to give eloquent speeches at your wedding, issue false earnings statements to smooth the way for apartment rental contracts, or provide plausible alibis to mask the actual activities of those who toil in the sex industry.

Shukan Jitsuwa (May 30) reports that perhaps due in part to the long 10-day Golden Week Holiday granted to many salaried workers, this type of service was in particularly high demand this year. The operator of one such service told the magazine he supposed the extended holiday this year caused workers to experience a "collapse in their mental balance," which led to outbreaks of the dreaded "May disease."

One recent customer told the magazine, "Even if you want to tell your company you want to quit, there are cases when they won't accept it. So I used the service to do everything for me. It informed them I would refuse to go in to work from the next day, and they gave in and accepted it without a major fuss."

The charge he paid for the service was 30,000 yen. In his view, considering the time and effort that would have otherwise been needed to negotiate his departure with his immediate superior and the firm's personnel manager, it was a bargain.

Companies that receive notification via one of these services generally find the situation to be exasperating.

"You get approached, unannounced, by some guy saying he represents a resignation stand-in service, and that he's been dispatched on behalf of a young employee who 'says he wants to quit,'" explains the human resources manager at a large trading firm. "The staff member then uses his accrued paid leave to avoid coming back to work from that day. Since there's no way we can force him to continue at the job, we were left with no other choice but to accept the resignation."

Shukan Jitsuwa cautions readers that not all operators of resignation stand-in services are trustworthy.

"In the past, an attorney might be employed to conduct negotiations between the company and the worker who wants to leave, but if you hire a unsavory person without any professional credentials, who knows what sort of problems it can lead to," warns an operator of one such business, who said some shady competitors have been known to engage in unethical practices, accepting payment but not actually following up with a visit to the company.

"Instead they'll lie to the client, telling the him, 'Negotiations have become bogged down,' and demand extra money," he warns.  

In the eyes of people born and raised in the Showa Era (1926-1989), employing this sort of service comes across as completely alien; but to members of the new Reiwa generation, this might very well become a standard practice, Shukan Jitsuwa suggests.

© Japan Today

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

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I used to hum that song as my retirement day approached. I was asked if I would stay on as a temp. My exact response was F NO.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

When I was made redundant, my boss didn’t tell me, but some HR low-life. So I quite sympathise with employees using this new service to resign.

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