First of all, I highly recommend you read this article for a quick summary:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False\_self-employment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/false_self-employment)
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To make a long story short, Gaba employees are just that; employees. The company may claim they’re “contractors” or some other nonsense, but it doesn’t work that way. You’re not a contractor because your employer decided you were so they could toss away half your rights. This has been held up consistently in courts around the world, and my understanding is that Japanese labor laws are well within the international trend.
Basically, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s considered a duck. The burden of proof is upon the person claiming it’s an elephant to provide compelling evidence the duck is actually an elephant.
So, Gaba is free to falsely tell its employees they’re contractors. They’re free to write it down in a meaningless, legally powerless employment agreement (you can’t sign away inherent rights. Any “contract” attempting to do so is inherently void). And they are free to issue you meaningless invoices claiming you owe them money for having open heart surgery instead of teaching Mrs. Tanaka last week.
However, the **minute** they withhold earned pay for doing so, they are in clear violation of employment law. *This is black and white*. You can’t dock a worker’s paycheck for imaginary violations. That’s wage theft, pure and simple.
Gaba is banking on the fact that these deductions will be small enough, here and there, that the employee will simply shrug their shoulders and accept it, because a paycheck minus 2-4k yen or whatever is probably not gonna cause them to navigate the labor board dispute system. Or so they hope. If someone really did rack up enough sick time that Gaba could issue them a “negative paycheck”, they’d probably either fire them before it got to that point, or drop the matter entirely because they know damn well this will not hold up in court.
The thing is, the union knows this. Or at least, it’s their job to know this. So when I see them making scare posts that Gaba can do this, my first and only question is WHY ARE THEY NOT CALLING THEM OUT on their absolute BS? The union is making it sound like Gaba actually has the power to do this, when they know damn well they don’t and it’s just a stupid bluff. Why not tell people that?
And of course, the answer is, they don’t want you, the average employee, to know your rights and flex them to a corrupt employer. They want you to loyally pay your monthly dues, so they can pretend to be the hero, protecting you from a danger that you could easily solve yourself with a simple phone call.
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