I would like to know the basic guidelines on how employees should report their working hours? Does it vary depending on the position of the employees in the company?  Also, what constitutes employees’ working hours, e.g. commuting to work, commuting to a client, working from home, and/or thinking about work?

Terminating an Employee in Japan Due to Poor Performance

What legal actions can we take against an employee who has been under-performing? Although, we constantly make efforts to address this non-performance issue such as doing performance reviews & setting realistic deadlines for him to improve, we see no significant improvements. We also discovered recently that this employee is making unauthorized sales deals to customers--deals that could make serious problems and could put our company at risk--that are actually violations of our company’s regulations. My biggest concern is that this employee could be a threat to our business. What is the most legal and effective way of terminating this employee?

We are a UK-based company with a subsidiary in Japan.  According to our current Managing Director, if he will be appointed as ‘employer’/managing director of our new KK company in January 2012,  he will still be covered by Social Security, but he will NOT  be covered by Employment insurance since he will be so called ‘employer.’  Since he will not be covered by the Employment Insurance, he wants our company to pay for the unemployment insurance benefit in case he gets out of job.

My question is that, can he be covered by the government Employment Insurance? Is Employment insurance part of Social Security benefit which is mandated by Japan labor law?