[redstripe]

I know it's cynical but it feels like the term "labour shortage" is just a way of complaining about not being able to find desperate laborers at bottom dollar. Here in Canada, I've seen plenty of job ads that were more or less "we have job, come work here". It's like they don't even try and then proceed to step 2: complain about the labor supply. I can only image that the situation is a lot worse in a country that overworks it's people as much as Japan.

[yourapostasy]

> ...I've seen plenty of job ads that were more or less "we have job, come work here". It's like they don't even try and then proceed to step 2: complain about the labor supply.

This kabuki theater by business political advocacy groups is a perverse form of the old Soviet joke "they pretend to pay us; we pretend to work", except the pretend on the part of labor hasn't taken hold yet at large scales. Perhaps a perverse form of a Potemkin village is a more fitting picture.

[microcolonel]

I think it's a bit judgemental to say that Japan overworks people, the place functions to some of the highest standards, and excels in many ways like nowhere else in the world.

After a lifetime of "overwork", retired japanese people opt to do part time work to stave off boredom. I think they just think of it differently.

[patio11]

Japan is a big country and there are people with diverse views in it. Overwork is widely recognized to be a societal problem here, in the same fashion that e.g. racism is widely recognized to be a problem in the US. You could certainly find people who disagree with either conclusion, but you could also find people who disagree that the earth is round.

There exist government employees whose literal only job is preventing deaths from exhaustion. Japan has at least a few hundred of these a year; the true number of excess overwork-caused death is probably low tens of thousands when you factor in suicides.

[mistermann]

> It's like they don't even try

It's often because the ad is "fake" in the sense that is is a mandatory first step before applying for a temporary foreign worker because they "couldn't find" a Canadian to fill the job. I know someone who worked at a foreign recruitment company so I know all about the outright fraud that goes on.

I also know someone that works at a company that sells relatively large $ commodities into China, so I get to see all the fraud of how Chinese do business (big deals being chopped up into smaller pieces and deposited into "nieces and nephews" accounts, etc).

I refuse to believe the Canadian government isn't well aware this is all going on (for example, it accidentally leaked that they don't audit suspicious real estate deals if a non-Canadian is involved as it might be perceived as racist), which is pretty damn depressing considering more and more people including high paid professionals are struggling financially.