Japan Press Weekly

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2013 August 28 - September 3 [LABOR]

Former shop manager discloses excessive workloads in fast food chain Lotteria

Akahata Sunday edition

In a series of reports of so-called “black corporations” carried in the Akahata Sunday edition, a former shop manager of major fast food chain Lotteria revealed how he was forced to deal with excessively heavy workloads.

“I was pushed to my mental and physical limits,” said the man in his 30s, who developed depression and quit the company a few years ago. “The company urged us to achieve a year-on-year profit increase of 10%. We were told to boost profits over and over again,” he said.

The man joined Lotteria as a regular employee in the late 1990s. For about 10 years, he was assigned as shop manager of nearly 10 stores in different locations from Hokkaido to the Kyushu region.

In order to achieve their profit quota, each store had to either increase their sales or cut their costs. According to the former shop manager, labor expenses often became the target in the effort to slash the total expenditure.

Among its 20 to 30 staff members, each store normally has only one or two regular workers, including a shop manager who is designated as a “middle-managerial position” unentitled to overtime payments. As a way to slash labor costs, the company forced shop managers to endure long overtime work, he revealed.

The man said, “I worked around 300 hours of overtime a month. Leaving my house at 6 in the morning, I worked till 1 or 2 a.m. without any overtime compensation. The company would send us a reprimand if we failed to punch a time card within 9 hours of work.

“When store sales were weak, I had part-timers take days off and worked to cover their shifts. Sometimes I even provided their salaries out of my own pocket in order to reduce payroll expenditures.”

He did so because of the “tremendous pressure” he felt to achieve the assigned target. If shop managers failed to meet their quota, they would be demoted or transferred to other companies in the group.

“But I still like Lotteria. That is why I want the company to establish a decent working environment and take care of its employees,” he said.

In response to Akahata’s inquiry, a Lotteria spokesman only said that the disclosed matter is “currently under investigation.”