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。