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The profusion of goofy "bakattaa" photos, shots by part-time restaurant workers in all kinds of disgusting poses uploaded on social network sites, are just the beginning of managements' headaches.
"The kid was from Kyushu, came up to attend college in Tokyo," relates a man named Hiraiwa, manager of a western style izakaya (pub) in Saitama Prefecture, to Shukan Taishu (Sept 23). "He seemed pretty serious. But after about two months, he'd was constantly chattering away with the female patrons. And I had to warn him when I caught him slipping his telephone number when returning change when they paid the bill.
"The same day two attractive female patrons came to the shop and he overheard them discussing snowboarding.
"'Next time you go, take me along with you, okay?' He interrupted, adding 'We can have fun together!'" He proceeded with a monologue about how he adored mogul skier Aiko Uemura. The customers never came back."
Management must also deal with naughty behavior between employees, particularly those of opposite sexes.
"After I took care of the cash receipts there were supposed to be two workers, one male and one female, still on duty, but I looked around and couldn't see them anyplace," says Osamu Kidokoro, operator of an izakaya (Japanese pub) in Kanagawa Prefecture. "I called out to them in a loud voice, and suddenly heard a rattling noise, and the two of them emerged from the men's lavatory, their clothing disheveled and faces sweaty from exertion. I was glad I hadn't opened the door and seen them..."
Such trysts between restaurant employees are said to be a fairly common occurrence.
"Once I walked in and saw a male and female bartender, wiping off whiskey bottles scattered around the counter while they were completely naked," says the operator of another shop. "They had flung off 'otsuyu' (bodily secretions) during sex and were in the process of cleaning up."
"Most of our part-time staff are girls who attend a nearby high school," says the manager of a Chinese-style family restaurant. "They all look cute wearing the abbreviated uniforms we provide them with. A thirtyish male employee had a hard time keeping his hands off, and got a 16-year-old pregnant. They wound up getting married. It's intolerable!"
Summer, of course, is the time when cases of food poisoning peak, and restaurant managers are expected to devote extra efforts to sanitation and control of foodstuffs. Imagine the manager's shock to learn an employee was taking unconsumed "goma dango" -- a Chinese dessert with sweet bean filling and an outer layer of glutinous rice sprinkled with sesame seeds that is deep fried in oil -- and "recycling them" because he felt it was "a waste" to throw them away.
Both the lunkhead who crawled in the freezer and another one who squeezed into an industrial-sized dishwasher at a Japanese-style noodle shop -- "Look, this his how I get clean, tee-hee!" he wrote -- have been soundly denounced by irate netizens for their repugnant, disgusting and unsanitary antics. But others steal from their employers, a practice that's also rampant.
"The part-timers rip off toilet paper and other supplies, shoyu (soy sauce) and miso (soy bean paste)," complained the boss at a seafood specialty restaurant.
"Since the shop's inventory system isn't very tight, we help ourselves to bottled beer to our heart's content," sneers a part-timer at a Korean barbecue restaurant. "We consider it as a fringe benefit."
"One part-timer I fired would rip off anything he could carry," says Takeshi Kurokawa, who operates a live house in Tokyo. "Vegetables like cabbages, eggplants and carrots; 10-kilogram bags of rice; 5-kilogram bags of frozen fried chicken... He even stole the kitchen knives and dishes.
"A couple of weeks afterward I saw him in the same neighborhood, working in the kitchen of a Turkish restaurant."
Before teaching part-time workers the ins and outs of their job, the magazine concludes, someone needs to provide them with lessons about simple human decency.
In a separate article, J-cast News (Sept 10) notes that the firing of such workers can also have undesirable repercussions, such as their posting revealing photos of dead rats trapped in their former employer's kitchen -- a phenomenon some media have dubbed "baito tero" (part-time worker terrorism).
© Japan Today
33 Comments
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gaijinfo
Project Mayhem
combinibento
For what it's worth, not a single sentence, except for in the final paragraph of this story about a separate article, even mentions striking back or taking revenge - the entire article is about naughty behavior.
LiveInTokyo
Seeing stories like this makes me wonder what might be possible at the Olympics!
felix88
ok, who hire betas for management positions ?
Alex Einz
i dont reckon any of those managers have any rights to complain when they pay 750Y an hour...
TSRnow
So now they need security cameras not just over the till, but over the kitchen...!
sighclops
"western-style izakaya"?
Novenachama
Humans are complex and one of the worst parts about being a business owner is dealing with difficult employees who are immature, irresponsible or very irritating. There attitudinal problems and counterproductive behavior can lead to lower quality performance, possibly ruin your business and become a nightmare. Unfortunately there is no perfect solution for dealing with these types of employees and often you don't know how to handle it. It may be hard to direct these individuals however show with your behavior what you expect and most will probably follow. If not remember you have the final say.
Graham DeShazo
In all goods and services, you generally get what you pay for. It seems stupid to think that labor would be any different. Low pay, poor conditions = unmotivated workers.
With the exception of the theft, you kind of reap what you sow.
Dennis711
Welcome to the age of the internet.... The restaurant and fast food shop rumors of old are blog posts with photos nowadays ... we are truly living in the beginning of the digital age.
bass4funk
Add to that, you have a different generation of Japanese people, these young kids are more rebellious, rambunctious, more connected to the rest of the world through Twitter, Facebook and the entire Internet, more access to things that are actually normal situations of growing teenagers. What makes Japanese kids different? They are people too and I can only imagine it will get worse, until these companies treat their staff and give them better wages or better working conditions, they shouldn't expect too much. This won't e the last time, unfortunately, that we hear these kind of stories.
Francis Urquhart
Hmm. I thought that Japanese people didn't steal things.
Anyway this tickled me:
You dress them like whores on purpose, then complain when they attract horny males? Gotta laugh!
Qamar
I don't agree..I'm sorry but even if it is 750Yen/hour, I think one shouldn't do this. If you don't like it, leave it, you don't have to go out of your way to act like this. It will just make shop owners weary of employing part-timers- and that will come to bite legs for future students. They will NOT raise wages, I know what I'm saying, unless the government/someone officially raises the minimum wage they wage will not raise. I don't agree with low paying labor, I just left my workplace because of that- but I simply left; told them the reason, asked them if they might raise, they told me no. No revenge, but they lost an honest worker and they're the ones who said it.
felix88
lol, people still think honesty will get them anywhere in the world.
JoiceRojo
Francis Urquhart youu took the words right under my fingers!!! I was thinking the exact same thing:
bruinfan
@ Bass4funk
I agree with you. Thumbs up!
Serrano
“Since the shop’s inventory system isn’t very tight, we help ourselves to bottled beer to our heart’s content,” sneers a part-timer at a Korean barbecue restaurant. “We consider it as a fringe benefit.”
This person needs to be slapped upside the head and fired.
cwhite
I reckon just a few security cameras would keep most indecencies to a minimum, one has to wonder why they don't have security cameras in the first place for various reasons.
umbrella
well japan has about 40% of its workers on these rubbish, totally insecure, futureless temporary contracts andhas a minimum wage at a disgusting 750 yen an hour. No wonder workers don't give a damn.
bicultural
Geez umbrella, they're talking about uni students here. By the way, minimum wage depends on prefecture. In Tokyo it's 850, but students working at an Izakaya will usually make at least 1150 for night time shifts
Amidalism
The majority of these problems could be solved if the business operators installed more security cameras, had tighter inventory systems, didn't dress their employees in skimpy outfits, employing zero tolerance policies, and of course gave their employees some form of incentive to be proud of their job - ie. paying them more, added benefits, etc.
These managers can complain all they want, but they sound like lazy pushover bosses.
VicMOsaka
umbrellaSep. 12, 2013 - 12:05AM JST well japan has about 40% of its workers on these rubbish, totally insecure, futureless temporary contracts andhas a minimum wage at a disgusting 750 yen an hour. No wonder workers don't give a damn..........................................................
I am glad to see that some people are aware of the pathetic part time work system and pitiful minimum hourly rate in Japan. I know of middle aged skilled workers who have lost jobs and are forced to work in such jobs to try and survive. Go and see what these low paid workers buy for their dinners at night-- Cup Noodles.
dcog9065
Yeah, well part-timers will be part-timers, they're young and generally don't care much about the work.
I do agree that if they were paid better wages, there may be more to lose for them if they were caught doing crap like this.
ReformedBasher
@bass
Nothing. Low pay, hormones, etc, same as any other country.
Oh dearie me, teens having fun, sex, etc. Who'd ever thought?
Mike Critchley
This sounds like normal behavior for every part-time job I've worked at both back home and in Europe. Japanese youth are starting to behave like everybody else on the planet -- starting to act like typical goofy young people on the job instead of well-trained robots. I love it! So the task for management then is to find out how to motivate and inspire them...rather than just expect that repeated training will result in perfect behavior.
almxxx
When parents and grandparents start advising children not to be life-long underpaid wage slaves, maybe there will be social changes that result in a happy and well paid lifetime......without being wealthy. The desire of every civilized country should be to offer a good life to average people; a good life to only the wealthy, already exists everywhere. It is time to return the favor of a happy life to the people who supplied it to the wealthy; the workers and customers. What good does it do to a society and it's health, for the already rich to continue money accumulation? These small fast food businesses are of course not the controllers of society.
Stewart
Pay peanuts - get monkeys
Qamar
Because many people think in the same way you do, the world is getting ruined. Yes, honesty can get you many things- true love, true friendship and true happiness among others. Not being honest might bring you success, but when it is time to face responsibility, will you try and cheat yourself out of them too?
yourock
when I had low-paying part-time jobs in the UK as a student, I did some things like inventing orders for customers so that I could eat it later. my boss kind of realized and started to offer me food to be thrown away which was perfectly edible at the end of my long day. when you receive peanuts of a hourly wage don't be surprised when people look for ways to make the job 'pay' in other ways. just saying.
4ArthurDent
If the part-timers felt the wages were too low then they should not have accepted employment. Even at 750Y per hour no business owner is paying to be stolen from or to have their going concern jeopardized.
Kabukilover
This sounds a lot like Wai Wai of old. I had trouble believing similar stories from the weeklies. I am taking this latest crop with a degree do skepticism.
RedMars
in another news, a Yakuza employer paid 287 yen per hour of overtime to his foreign worker and he was proud to announce it and boasting it to be "strictly regulation"........
there you go, we have idiot employers in the midst of all these funny employment rules...... sure it is "strictly regulation = Yakuza regulation he meant" I suppose.
Any1 would steal knife and forks or beers if 287 yen is all u get for an hour of overtime, can u imagine what you would get for normal hour?
This Yakuza employer should be put under "strict regulation" too!