日企：不想離職？請進無聊辦公室
Layoffs Taboo, Japan Workers Are Sent to the Boredom Room
禁止裁員：日本員工被送至“無聊辦公室”
Shusaku Tani is employed at the Sony plant here, but he doesn’t really work.
秀策山谷（音譯）雖然被當地索尼公司僱傭，但卻沒有真正在工作。
For more than two years, he has come to a small room, taken a seat and then passed the time reading newspapers, browsing the Web and poring over engineering textbooks from his college days. He files a report on his activities at the end of each day.
兩年多來，他一直都到一間小辦公室裏上班，每天就是讀讀報紙，上上網打發時間，還把他上大學時的工程學課本都看了一遍。等到每日公司下班時，再交一份工作報告就算完成任務了。
Sony, Mr. Tani’s employer of 32 years, consigned him to this room because they can’t get rid of him. Sony had eliminated his position at the Sony Sendai Technology Center, which in better times produced magnetic tapes for videos and cassettes.
秀策先生在索尼工作了32年，因爲公司無法對他進行裁員，只能安排他到這間“無聊辦公室”工作。秀策曾在索尼仙台技術中心工作，專門生產錄音錄像磁帶。但隨着行業日漸沒落，他的職位也被迫撤銷。
But Mr. Tani, 51, refused to take an early retirement offer from Sony in late 2010 — his prerogative under Japanese labor law.
2010年末，索尼要求51歲的秀策先生提早退休，但他行使日本法律拒絕了這一要求。
So there he sits in what is called the “chasing-out room.” He spends his days there, with about 40 other holdouts. “I won’t leave,” Mr. Tani said. “Companies aren’t supposed to act this way. It’s inhumane.”
從此之後他便被安排在“無聊辦公室”裏工作，和另外40個不肯提早退休的人在一起無所事事。秀策先生說：“不會離開公司，他們不應該這樣做，這種做法太殘忍了。”
The standoff between workers and management at the Sendai factory underscores an intensifying battle over hiring and firing practices in Japan, where lifetime employment has long been the norm and where large-scale layoffs remain a social taboo, at least at Japan’s largest corporations.
從仙台工廠裏員工和管理者對峙的僵局中可以看出，日本招聘和解僱之爭正在愈演愈烈。在日本，至少在日本最大的幾個企業中，終身聘用制是公司傳統，而大規模裁員還屬於社會禁忌。
Sony said it was not doing anything wrong in placing employees in what it calls Career Design Rooms.
但索尼稱把員工送進他們所說的“職業規劃辦公室” 中並不違規違法。Employees are given counseling to find new jobs in the Sony group, or at another company, it said. Sony also said that it offered workers early retirement packages that are generous by American standards: in 2010, it promised severance payments equivalent to as much as 54 months of pay.
索尼表示，員工可以接受專家諮詢，在索尼內部或其他公司找到新的工作。而且他們爲提前退休員工的資金補償要比美國標準高得多：2010年，索尼承諾給員工的遣散費和他們工作54個月的工資一樣多。
But the real point of the rooms is to make employees feel forgotten and worthless — and eventually so bored and shamed that they just quit, critics say.
但批評者說，“無聊辦公室” 存在的真正意圖是讓員工感到自己被人遺忘，一無是處，最終在百無聊賴和顏面掃地中提交辭呈。
Labor practices in Japan contrast sharply with those in the United States, where companies are quick to lay off workers when demand slows or a product becomes obsolete.
日本和美國的勞動法差別巨大，當市場需求減緩、產品過時後，美國的公司有權迅速裁員。
It is cruel to the worker, but it usually gives the overall economy agility. Some economists attribute the lack of a dynamic economy in Western Europe to labor laws similar to Japan’s that restrict layoffs.
這種做法對員工來說很殘酷，但通常卻能讓整個經濟週轉更靈活敏捷。有些經濟學家認爲，西歐經濟衰微的主要原因就是採用了同日本類似的勞動法，限制了公司的裁員能力。
Japan’s biggest companies appear to be imitating Sony. Local media reports say many of them, including Panasonic, NEC and Toshiba, use the oidashibeya, or chase-out rooms, and similar tactics.
日本最大的幾家公司似乎都在學索尼的做法。當地媒體報道包括松下、NEC、東芝在內的公司都有這種“無聊辦公室”，採取的策略也大致相同。
In May, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported that an employee at a Panasonic unit was being required to spend his days in a room staring at monitors to catch irregularities.
五月，日本報紙《朝日新聞》報道，松下要求它的一位員工整日待在辦公室裏，坐在電腦顯示屏前監測有無不正常情況出現。
Last year, a Tokyo court ordered Benesse, an educational services company, to reinstate a worker who claimed she had been required to do demeaning, menial tasks after resisting pressure to leave.
去年東京一法庭要求日本教育服務貝樂思公司恢復一位員工職位，據稱這位員工在拒絕辭職後一直被要求做卑微下賤、有損人格的工作。
