Seven-Eleven Japan Co. will introduce a system to centrally manage the residence status and other information regarding foreigners working at its stores, in a bid to prevent its franchisees from illegally hiring laborers whose residence cards have already expired, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.
Amid an increasing number of foreign workers in the nation, the major convenience store operator is beefing up its labor management system.
The convenience store industry is not included in the 14 sectors in which foreigners will be allowed to work under new types of residence statuses, which require specialized skills, based on the revised Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law that will take effect next April.
Seven-Eleven and some other operators in the sector are hoping that the industry will be added to the 14 industries in future, and are thus establishing a stricter system for managing foreign workers' residence statuses.
Seven-Eleven is considering introducing a unified system as early as this spring under which its head office will centrally keep and manage data on the residence statuses of foreign workers at Seven-Eleven stores.
Under the envisaged system, the company will take a photo of each foreign staff member's residence card with a smartphone to gather data stated on the cards such as type of status, expiration date, card number and physical address, sources said.
Several months prior to the expiration date of a residence card, the head office will notify by e-mail the cardholder and others, including the personnel management officer of the store where the cardholder works.
The company will also introduce a method by which it can detect forged residence cards using a Justice Ministry search system, according to the sources.
Seven-Eleven plans to first introduce the system in the stores it operates directly before gradually expanding it to about 20,000 franchised stores across the nation.
Currently, the number of foreigners working in the company's stores totals about 30,000 employees, or about 8 percent of its entire workforce.
If Seven-Eleven can compile a database of its foreign employees in each region using categories such as number of workers and nationality, the new system is expected to be useful in helping the company properly allocate staff.
Similar systems are already in use by a major food-service chain. In the restaurant industry, one major chain's manager and several senior officials were caught this spring for having foreign students work more than 28 hours a week -- the upper limit set for foreign students in Japan. Even if the company was unaware that the foreigners were working illegally, the employer is seen to have failed in proper labor management and is responsible for strictly managing the issue.
In the convenience store industry, the combined number of foreigners working for Seven-Eleven, FamilyMart Co. and Lawson, Inc., the three major operators, has reached 50,000 and accounts for about 7 percent of the sector's entire workforce. Under such circumstances, however, managing the information of foreign workers' residence statuses is in many cases left in the hands of the owners of franchised stores.
A senior Seven-Eleven official raised concerns over the situation, saying, "Even if a single store employs an illegal foreign worker, it is deemed as a flaw in the management of Seven-Eleven as a whole."
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