(MENAFN- Arab News) OTA Japan: Yasuyuki Yoshinaga was in a good mood at the early May earnings briefing in Tokyo. The top executive at the maker of Subaru automobiles joked that he would have to wear a helmet on an upcoming trip to the United States. The reason: Dealers were going to hit him over the head for not supplying them with enough of his cars to sell.
Subaru's US sales have almost doubled in the past four years. At the heart of that success is the company's Forester all-wheel-drive SUV which has carved out a following with American drivers for its performance price and aura of social responsibility.
That's been a key selling point for Subaru which has marketed itself in the US as the automaker with a conscience. Subaru's "Love Promise" in which it pledges to make "a positive impact in the world" has helped build loyal consumers in states like California New York and Washington.
What Subaru does not tout is that its boom is made possible in part by asylum seekers and other cheap foreign laborers from Asia and Africa.
They work at the automaker and its suppliers at Subaru's main production hub here in the Japanese town of Ota two hours north of Tokyo. Many are on short-term contracts. At Subaru some foreign workers earn about half the wage of their Japanese equivalents on the production line. At the automaker's suppliers workers are often employed through brokers who charge up to a third of the workers' wages. From countries including Bangladesh Nepal Mali and China these foreign laborers are building many of the parts for the Forester including its leather seats often in grueling conditions.
A Reuters investigation of factory conditions in Ota including a review of pay-slips and asylum applications and interviews with dozens of laborers from 22 countries reveals that foreign workers are enduring abuses at the hands of labor brokers and companies in the Subaru supply chain.
These include workers at Subaru's suppliers like Lakhan Rijal a stocky 34-year-old asylum seeker who said he was fired after injuring his back at a plant that makes seats for the automaker. Other foreign workers spoke about being pressured to work double shifts being dismissed without notice and having no insurance.
Most of the 120 workers interviewed by Reuters were earning the minimum wage for machinery manufacturing in Ota's Gunma prefecture $6.60 an hour or above.
But Reuters also found more than a dozen Indonesian laborers at two small Subaru suppliers who said their net monthly pay was $730. That works out to $3.30 per hour after rent utilities and fees owed to the dispatch company in their home country had been deducted.
The problems in the Subaru supply chain are an outgrowth of Japan's peculiar labor market which has tightened as the nation's population shrinks and its barriers to legal immigration remain high.
Squeezed by a lack of workers companies like Subaru and its suppliers are resorting to what is effectively a system of back-door immigration of asylum seekers visa overstayers and Asian trainees. This gray market in labor enables the employment nationwide of tens of thousands of foreigners on the cheap in sectors such as construction agriculture and manufacturing.
Subaru's parent company Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. said its suppliers are responsible for their own labor practices and it was not directly involved in supervising working conditions. Obeying the law and company guidelines are a prerequisite to doing business with Subaru the company said in a written response to questions from Reuters. The company also said it had no power to monitor the behavior of labor brokers.