I have a friend who is contemplating suing her current employer but is worried about the blow-back that potentially could occur. I have zero experience in this so I thought I’d ask the community here. The company is situated in Osaka if the prefecture matters.
This is a fairly small company with mostly Japanese employees but roughly 20% are English-speaking foreigners. The CEO is a woman in her 50s who is an absolute psychopath. I don’t mean “she’s mean” psycho, I mean “I didn’t like the way that guy said good morning, follow me to HR, you will help me make sure he gets fired”. This woman has gotten several people to quit due to workplace harassment, she even got the head of HR to quit who cited the CEO as the reason for leaving (I imagine that exit interview must have been quite the spectacle). Other things that have happen include
* Publicly shaming/yelling at an employee because they asked for a day off 3 weeks in advance
* Throwing a chair into the wall when a report deadline was missed
* Openly admits to firing people just because she doesn’t like them
And his is only what my friend has told me. Apparently one previous employee did sue her but either it didn’t get to become a case, or the company won the case, not sure which one it was.
Obviously, to bring this in as a case you need solid evidence like video or audio recordings, mail or otherwise hard evidence this is going on but there are several worries with this. Japan has pretty iron-clad privacy laws, does it operate like several states in the US in the same sense that both parties need to be aware that a recording is being made or it won’t be admissible as evidence? Storing mail or documents on USB drives or BCCing your personal mail would technically be bringing corporate information outside corporate networks and that surely could backfire couldn’t it? Manually typing up a diary like “2023-02-01, CEO did so and so” would be pretty easy to dismiss as falsified wouldn’t it?
The immediate solution is to just quit and leave it behind, but she feels an obligation to prevent others from suffering from this woman’s wrath. Talking directly to a lawyer would probably be best but I thought I’d ask here first.
5 comments
japan is 1-party consent for recording
Why don’t the Japanese staff just quit or sue the owner?
Why is your title “former employer” but the content is “current employer”?
The firing issue and not giving the leaves can be a labor issue, the temper stuff is largely irrelevant. This is just my opinion.
> Apparently one previous employee did sue her but either it didn’t get to become a case, or the company won the case, not sure which one it was.
Seems like this and the circumstances are super important info.
What do you expect to happen to a company when the CEO is gone…?
Don’t quit. Make her try to fire you, say no, and record everything. Then find a good labor lawyer.
I don’t think there is much chance of success if someone quits a job and then sues the employer for treatment of the other staff.
Nothing in your post appears to be about things the CEO actually did to your friend who wants to quit.
Typically when people have success in court against an employer it is when they are fired, if you quit on your own it’s going to be harder to get anywhere in court, although arguing that the employee was forced into quitting could work.
In one of your replies you say that you don’t think the friend is mentally prepared to stay on at the job, do you think they are mentally prepared for a court case that drags on for years? I would suggest quitting and moving on – your post frames it as this person wanting to do something to stop the CEOs bad treatment of other employees, even if successful in court I doubt it would make a difference, people typically go to court because they are after money from a settlement, not some idea of preventing bad treatment of others.