ブラック企業 (burakku kigyō) or ブラック会社 (burakku gaisha), meaning "black corporation" or "black business/ black company" respectively, are Japanese terms for an exploitative, sometimes outright abusive business organisation. The Other Wiki
succinctly sums up the phenomenon as a sweatshop-like environment, only associated with office work instead of textile manufacturing.
The term "black company" was coined in the early 2000s by young IT workers but has since come to be applied to various industries, including sales, the service industry (e.g., restaurants) and entertainment. It's also sometimes used to refer to companies that are from outside Japan. A 2009 short film titled ブラック会社に勤めてるんだが、もう俺は限界かもしれない note helped bring the concept of "black companies" into the cultural zeitgeist, particularly the depicted company's ruthless and unethical work environment. This was made worse by how the film was Based on a True Story, its genesis being a 2ch thread by an office worker about the black company he worked at.
While specifics may vary from workplace to workplace and company to company, there are several common practices of black companies: low pay (and low annual salary increases), long working hours (including huge amounts of overtime), little to no overtime pay, very few or no days off, and various forms of harassment (including power harassment note , sexual harassment note , moral harassment note , alcohol harassment note and maternity harassment note ).
To help get away with this sort of behaviour, a black company will often hire a large number of young employees who are often less knowledgeable about their rights. In order to make the employees stay, superiors of black companies will often threaten young employees with disrepute if they choose to quit and the company will almost assuredly take pains to make the employees think that the company is the only one that would take them. Particularly insidious black companies will recruit people from overseas, who would have even less familiarity with Japanese labour laws and would be even more vulnerable to threats of legal action once they've arrived in Japan and are cut off from support systems like family and friends.
In 2014, a lawyer named Yoshiyuki Iwasa created a checklist for a website called Business Media to help identify whether a company is "black" or "not black." There are thirty items on the list and if none of them apply to the company, it is pure white. If 1-9 items are applicable, it is considered gray. 10-14 is dark gray. 30 out of 30 is pitch black.
1. I work overtime, but overtime is never paid.
2. It's usual to work more than 80 hours overtime a month.
3. I don't have a break, or at the most, 10 minutes a day.
4. I work on my days off. Actually, I'm not even sure when my days off are.
5. There is no paid time off system or if there is such a system, I am never allowed to use it.
6. I never get reimbursed for expenses and always have to pay out of pocket.
7. There is no social insurance, benefits, or pension. If I ask about this, I would be bullied.
8. If I converted my monthly wage into an hourly rate equivalent, it would be less than minimum wage.
9. Regardless of how long I work overtime, the overtime payment is a fixed amount.
10. The company is constantly hiring new employees.
11. The advertised job wage is different from the actual amount paid.
12. There are no time cards or someone else punches you in and out.
13. There are one or more workers who can't come to the office due to psychotic depression or nervous breakdown.
14. I'm so busy that I often can't get adequate sleep.
15. There is no union or company regulations.
16. Some employees are promoted to an administrative position right after joining the company, but there is no extra remuneration for that.
17. Employees have to run private errands for their employers.
18. There is a slogan saying "work until you die" on the company wall.
19. Abuse of power and sexual harassment are very common.
20. There are so many affiliate companies and subsidiaries, though I don't even know what those companies do.
21. Whenever some incident happens, the company changes its name.
22. There are training sessions, which use what can be considered brainwashing or hazing.
23. Threats such as "I'm going to kill you" can be commonly heard at the office.
24. Violence is rampant.
25. All the supervisors are relatives of the CEO.
26. I was told to quit the company in a roundabout way like, "you may not be cut out for this position."
27. I can't quit the job. If I say I'm going to quit, I'll be threatened that I will have to pay damages for quitting.
28. They don't provide the necessary documents such as the separation slip to those who try to quit.
29. The worker's average age is really young.
30. The rate of people leaving their jobs within 3 years is really high.
In 2012, some lawyers, journalists, and non-profit organization workers formed an independent committee named the Most Evil Corporations Award (ブラック企業大賞 Burakku Kigyo Taishou roughly meaning "Black Corporation Grand Prize") Committee to raise awareness of the toxic working environment. They gathered data and published a nomination list of black companies. The Most Evil Corporations Award would be given to the company that was voted the most "black" by the public. The winners were invited to the award ceremony and would receive a copy of the Labor Standard Acts as a gift (though unsurprisingly no "winner" ever sent representatives to accept said award). The award was held annually between 2012 and 2019, eventually ending in 2020 as the committee shifted focus to dealing with employment issues raised during the COVID-19 pandemic.
1. Actual public records on occupational problems such as a long work time, sexual harassment, or abuse of power.
2. Long intense work hours. According to the Japanese Standards Act, employees can only work 8 hours a day (40 hours a week). They can work overtime 15 hours a week, 27 hours per two weeks, 45 hours a month, and 360 hours a year if the company submits some paperwork and is approved by the Labor Standards Inspection Office. Under particular circumstances, the legal overtime limit can be up to 80 hours. Black companies generally blithely ignore these requirements, routinely demanding employees work from 9am to 9pm including weekends and up to 200 hours of overtime.
3. Low pay. The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare set a minimum wage per prefecture, pay that after deductions falls under this rate per hour (for example, in Tokyo the minimum wage in 2021 was set for 1041 yen per hour) is almost certainly a sign of a black company. Many black companies hide this by advertising monthly wages, but calculating the resulting hourly rate would reveal the truth.
4. Compliance violations.
5. Flaws in the system, such as lack of childcare leave or maternity leave.
6. Hostility to unions.
7. Discrimination against temporary workers.
8. Dependence upon temporary workers (i.e., a high rate of employee turnover).
9. Unpaid overtime (and lies about paid overtime in job advertisements). A typical excuse is that the overtime pay is "included in the salary".
Note that in fiction, black companies are not necessarily related to Evil, Inc. (and in fact, many examples of Evil, Inc. are actually better places to work at than black companies). A typical MegaCorp may be a black company, especially in a Cyberpunk setting. Black companies are also specifically utilised in Japanese settings, while Abusive Workplace is more general.
