Business plan no. 304: a corporate penal colony

One of the fun things about Japanese law is that it’s really, really difficult to fire people who aren’t on a fixed-term contract. You can’t lay people off for economic reasons in Japan unless there’s simply no way for the company to survive. And you can’t lay people off for poor performance unless they break their rules of employment, which generally requires some sort of intentional wrongdoing or gross negligence.

So Japanese companies don’t fire people; instead, they demote them to undesirable jobs. If the assistant manager in Tokyo isn’t working hard enough, he might get sent to Ehime. If he still doesn’t earn his salary, he might be gradually moved toward the basement, much like Milton in Office Space, until finally he gets the idea to quit.

But maybe some people don’t mind being in Ehime. And therein lies the problem… what do you do when you can’t fire a really crap worker?

Solution: Send them to your “branch office” at the Iwo Jima Commercial Park, a development managed by Mutant Frog Capital Partners®. We’ll fly your “special” employees to a tiny self-contained office and dormitory at our compound on Iwo Jima, a sulfur-filled volcanic island in the middle of nowhere that’s still covered in unexploded ordnance from 1945. With no connections to the outside world, they’ll only have time to do your work! And if they decide to quit, we’ll fly them home and you’ll never see them again!

Ah, if I only had the money, I would show the world what a real redhead can do.

2 thoughts on “Business plan no. 304: a corporate penal colony”

  1. Mutant Frog Capital Partners sounds like it would be a delightfully evil enterprise. Maybe we can open contract-basis corporate reeducation facilities that would save companies the cost of maintaining such facilities themselves. I mean, the possibilities for profiting from corporate Japan’s inefficiencies may be endless.

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