Hey everyone. I’ve searched and I’m coming up with conflicting information, so if you could help me confirm, I’d be grateful.
What’s the minimum legal notice you are required to give an employer of your resignation?
For context, this is when you have been employed by a company on a one year contract (and you have been working for them for less than a year.)
In my company contract it states 2 months, and this seems long – companies I’ve worked with before have required one month only (though, they weren’t in Japan.)
If I were to just give a month’s notice and leave… what could the consequences be?
4 comments
~~2 weeks. anything above that and they can pound sand.~~
disregard, I suck cocks
1. if you have worked there less than 1 year or are on a <1 year contract and have not renewed the notice period is whats specified in the contract
2. if you are a permanent employee, have worked there >1 year, or have renewed your contract the legal period is 2 weeks regardless of what is in the contract
3. the consequences are unless you are a high level executive the amount of financial damage they could show is so much less than the time trouble and expense to sue you its literally irrelevant
btw my last contract outside Japan was 3 months from the end of the month you gave notice in…
> If I were to just give a month’s notice and leave… what could the consequences be?
As nobody has addressed this: in theory, your employer can sue you for damages if you leave with less than the legaly mandated amount of notice. In practice, they would have to prove actual damages. In the case of a relatively junior employee with less than a year in the company, those damages are likely to be less than the cost of the lawyer.
It’s generally pretty rare for this to happen. Typically, you only see this when it’s an employee with highly specialized and specific skills and the departure causes significant financial impact. That said, someone posted a while back about an employer who aggressively did it – despite losing money – apparently out of sheer spite.
For OP’s case with short term employment, I’d say follow the contract since you agreed to it.
2 weeks in most cases unless otherwise explicitly stated and agreed to beforehand for long-term employees, but when I submitted notice 2 months in advance I did get guilted that it’s ‘minimum 3 months, 4-6 if you want to show proper manners’ which was nothing but lunacy and gaslighting at its finest. I copy-pasted screenshots that said otherwise from reputable references/guidelines on Japanese labour sites and went my merry way.