日企：不想离职？请进无聊办公室

Layoffs Taboo, Japan Workers Are Sent to the Boredom Room
禁止裁员：日本员工被送至“无聊办公室”

Shusaku Tani is employed at the Sony plant here, but he doesn’t really work.
秀策山谷（音译）虽然被当地索尼公司雇佣，但却没有真正在工作。

For more than two years, he has come to a small room, taken a seat and then passed the time reading newspapers, browsing the Web and poring over engineering textbooks from his college days. He files a report on his activities at the end of each day.
两年多来，他一直都到一间小办公室里上班，每天就是读读报纸，上上网打发时间，还把他上大学时的工程学课本都看了一遍。等到每日公司下班时，再交一份工作报告就算完成任务了。

Sony, Mr. Tani’s employer of 32 years, consigned him to this room because they can’t get rid of him. Sony had eliminated his position at the Sony Sendai Technology Center, which in better times produced magnetic tapes for videos and cassettes.
秀策先生在索尼工作了32年，因为公司无法对他进行裁员，只能安排他到这间“无聊办公室”工作。秀策曾在索尼仙台技术中心工作，专门生产录音录像磁带。但随着行业日渐没落，他的职位也被迫撤销。

But Mr. Tani, 51, refused to take an early retirement offer from Sony in late 2010 — his prerogative under Japanese labor law.
2010年末，索尼要求51岁的秀策先生提早退休，但他行使日本法律拒绝了这一要求。

So there he sits in what is called the “chasing-out room.” He spends his days there, with about 40 other holdouts. “I won’t leave,” Mr. Tani said. “Companies aren’t supposed to act this way. It’s inhumane.”
从此之后他便被安排在“无聊办公室”里工作，和另外40个不肯提早退休的人在一起无所事事。秀策先生说：“不会离开公司，他们不应该这样做，这种做法太残忍了。”

The standoff between workers and management at the Sendai factory underscores an intensifying battle over hiring and firing practices in Japan, where lifetime employment has long been the norm and where large-scale layoffs remain a social taboo, at least at Japan’s largest corporations.
从仙台工厂里员工和管理者对峙的僵局中可以看出，日本招聘和解雇之争正在愈演愈烈。在日本，至少在日本最大的几个企业中，终身聘用制是公司传统，而大规模裁员还属于社会禁忌。

Sony said it was not doing anything wrong in placing employees in what it calls Career Design Rooms.
但索尼称把员工送进他们所说的“职业规划办公室” 中并不违规违法。

Employees are given counseling to find new jobs in the Sony group, or at another company, it said. Sony also said that it offered workers early retirement packages that are generous by American standards: in 2010, it promised severance payments equivalent to as much as 54 months of pay.
索尼表示，员工可以接受专家咨询，在索尼内部或其他公司找到新的工作。而且他们为提前退休员工的资金补偿要比美国标准高得多：2010年，索尼承诺给员工的遣散费和他们工作54个月的工资一样多。

But the real point of the rooms is to make employees feel forgotten and worthless — and eventually so bored and shamed that they just quit, critics say.
但批评者说，“无聊办公室” 存在的真正意图是让员工感到自己被人遗忘，一无是处，最终在百无聊赖和颜面扫地中提交辞呈。

Labor practices in Japan contrast sharply with those in the United States, where companies are quick to lay off workers when demand slows or a product becomes obsolete.
日本和美国的劳动法差别巨大，当市场需求减缓、产品过时后，美国的公司有权迅速裁员。

It is cruel to the worker, but it usually gives the overall economy agility. Some economists attribute the lack of a dynamic economy in Western Europe to labor laws similar to Japan’s that restrict layoffs.
这种做法对员工来说很残酷，但通常却能让整个经济周转更灵活敏捷。有些经济学家认为，西欧经济衰微的主要原因就是采用了同日本类似的劳动法，限制了公司的裁员能力。

Japan’s biggest companies appear to be imitating Sony. Local media reports say many of them, including Panasonic, NEC and Toshiba, use the oidashibeya, or chase-out rooms, and similar tactics.
日本最大的几家公司似乎都在学索尼的做法。当地媒体报道包括松下、NEC、东芝在内的公司都有这种“无聊办公室”，采取的策略也大致相同。

In May, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported that an employee at a Panasonic unit was being required to spend his days in a room staring at monitors to catch irregularities.
五月，日本报纸《朝日新闻》报道，松下要求它的一位员工整日待在办公室里，坐在电脑显示屏前监测有无不正常情况出现。

Last year, a Tokyo court ordered Benesse, an educational services company, to reinstate a worker who claimed she had been required to do demeaning, menial tasks after resisting pressure to leave.
去年东京一法庭要求日本教育服务贝乐思公司恢复一位员工职位，据称这位员工在拒绝辞职后一直被要求做卑微下贱、有损人格的工作。