Hi all,
I’ve been hitting the absolute wall that is burnout and finally decided to do something about it by asking my boss to reduce my hours. He asked by how much and I, not expecting him to actually agree to it, said between 20-25 a week.
He gave me the choice between staying as a 正社員 or switching me to a yearly contract and officially turning the job into バイト.
My yearly income would be the same, but this job has a pretty high bonus ratio, so I’m concerned that if I go the 正社員 route my monthly income will fall to pretty low levels. On the other hand, if I accept the change to part time officially, my monthly income would be higher (since no bonus), but I’m worried about whether there are any restrictions on renewing a visa under a baito contract.
I know sometimes yearly income can be a concern when it comes to renewals, but at 20 hours a week I’d still be safely over 4 million yen, so theoretically that shouldn’t prove a barrier.
I’m also wondering if there’s anything I’m missing when comparing 正社員 to バイト since the hours would still be the same.
Thanks for reading this far!
5 comments
Just go home
I can’t answer the visa question, but I can tell you that non-*seishain* positions are often freed from the onerous evaluation systems that many companies have.
A few years ago I was being moved to a new department and the new manager wanted to change my contract from *seishain* to a renewable contract with the same monthly base, and freedom from the evaluation system that can cause your salary to go up or down, but no bonus.
I (now regretfully) insisted on retaining my rights as a *seishain*. So while I couldn’t be non-renewed, they *could* lower my pay by quite a lot after I underperformed in my new role.
I suppose for you a big part of your decision is whether you think you’ll be able to perform much better with lower hours. Hopefully that will work out well and you can avoid the burnout that would end up lowering your pay anyway if you kept working full time but stayed burned out.
They look at your income. Steady income is best, for longer is better. Full time vs part time isn’t even something you report. Basically as long as you have enough to live on that’s good enough at least how my scrivener explained to me. I’m working much less than 20 hours a week but pull in ¥350k a month (this was enough for a dependent visa for my wife). I just asked my boss to write contract stating estimated annual income with no mention of hours worked as it’s not really relevant. amount of hours doesn’t count unless you want your job experience to count for HSP visa, all experience has to be full time work.
You don’t have to worry about the exact number of hours as long as you can support yourself. I’ve done 2 renewals with part time and freelance jobs, all with varying hours, and they’ve never checked. They COULD ask if they wanted to, but at those hours and that salary you’ll be perfectly fine.
There wouldn’t be any issue on the part time contract/seishyain end.
The only caveat I can think of is you would have to check whether you are still on shakai hoken and kousei nenkin. If not then you would have to register for kokumin hoken and nenkin effectively turning you into a freelancer/contractor.
It is possible to renew a working engineer/humanities SOR as a freelancer/contractor.