Boss's power harassment caused my schizophrenia, seeking legal aid
This article is available in multiple languages and was translated by Deep Learning Translate
这篇文章有多语言版本，由Deep Learning Translate翻译。中文版:
この記事は多言語で掲載されており、ディープラーニング翻訳によって翻訳されました。日本語版:
Check the mental state of Yuzuki Cat
Cat here refers to me (the author), my common name is Yuzuki (柚木), so you can call me Yuzu, Yuzu Cat or Cat. A common name is a name that foreigners living in Japan use to make their lives easier, like a Japanese name, which has legal effect (e.g. a signature) after it is registered with the government, or can be used daily without government registration. The company where Cat is now working has a system where the boss verbally recognizes the use of common names (the possibility that the boss will reverse his decision and abolish the system in the future cannot be ruled out).
On September 27, 2023, the boss of the company where I am now staying wrote a list of things he was not happy with me and then asked me to write a review. I thought it was factually incorrect, so I refused to accept it. However, he insisted on giving it to me, so I tore it up in front of him. This PUA (power harassment) incident took place in the conference room next door to the office, where no one else was present except me and the boss, I was called over by an intern, the boss read the list verbally (didn't even dare to look at me in the eye), and I recorded the whole thing, [Link to the full version of the recording is on One Drive - 230927_1714.wav] (https://kamisu66-my.sharepoint.com/:u:/p/yuzuki_cat/EeMGq3TcRGVKjO--3rvgyA8BrQjgZiBRkvMlYbTJe89Y7A?nav=eyJyZWZlcnJhbEluZm8iOnsicmVmZXJyYWxBcHAiOiJPbmVEcml2ZUZvckJ1c2luZXNzIiwicmVmZXJyYWxBcHBQbGF0Zm9ybSI6IldlYiIsInJlZmVycmFsTW9kZSI6InZpZXciLCJyZWZlcnJhbFZpZXciOiJNeUZpbGVzTGlua0RpcmVjdCJ9fQ&e=c9bHXA (opens in a new tab)). Please forgive me if my voice sounds strange because my mind is often in a state of stress and anxiety.
The follow up is that on October 9, 2023, I found out that the current owner was sending a delivery to my house. For now I'm going to leave it alone, I think he's sick and wants to kick me out.
I am seeking legal assistance for labor arbitration in Japan. The boss of the company I'm staying at now has been treating me like a PUA (power harassment) for a long time, making me take the blame and causing my depression to worsen and schizophrenia to set in. At the same time, he intentionally used my dead name and wrong gender to address me. I have all the email records, Discord group and private chat records since I started. A portion of meetings and conversations. I made the unclassified part public on this Github repository - yuzukicat/evidence.yuzuki (opens in a new tab) and One Drive.
The boss of the company I'm staying at now sending a delivery to my house is harassing me. He has a long history of PUA (power harassment) on me, and mailing undocumented lists to employees' homes for me to write a review is harassment. Secondly, socially, Cat is an ADHDer who forgets about GAS reminders... but I need to make sure that my "placing his deliveries for processing" is not a predictable behavior or a setup. I think he may have a lawyer on his side (or maybe I'm just having a schizophrenic episode).
By the way, I have a question: Why don't you just send me a Discord or E-Mail now? I don't think he knows that I have a backup of the Discord and the e-mail (even if he wanted to delete it afterward, the backup would still be there at that point in time).
On October 12, 2023, I was told by Discord, the owner of the company I now work for, that I didn't have to go to the office, and at the same time removed me from the Discord work group, removed me from the Github organization, and deleted my work email address, although I didn't think I was obligated to talk to my boss privately via Discord. They changed the access code and banned me from getting my personal belongings, I called the police on my previous place of employment for illegally seizing my personal belongings, and got my personal belongings back under the protection of three police officers.
Because the company I work for now has not separated business PCs and private PCs for a long time, I have a local Git repository and client data on my personal PC. But firstly, I didn't sign a non-disclosure agreement (because they forgot to ask me to sign one when I joined the company), and secondly, even if I did sign a non-disclosure agreement, the company's rules are not above the law - seizing my personal belongings that I have a right to.
Cat Declaration
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The disclosure of evidence is in line with the company's confidentiality constraints on me. I was not required to sign any confidentiality or disclosure agreement when I started my job, and there is no requirement to do so in my employment contract. There is no requirement in the employment contract, nor in the company's informal rules and regulations called RTFM. Although my boss objected to the use of a tape recorder to record meetings on several occasions with the words "Fell Anonying", I do not believe that his objection has any regulatory or legal effect.
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There is no problem with my attendance. My paychecks show the company's tax records. Taxes here are broadly defined and include records of social security and annuity payments. These records themselves prove the company's recognition that I "sold my time for pay". Other supporting evidence includes the company's daily report system, which requires reporting on daily work, and the morning meeting system, in which the boss and coworkers work together to confirm the day's work plan. This could prove that the content of my work was also recognized through the appropriate procedures. Regarding the daily report system, some of my daily reports are in this github folder - I.Developer Logs (opens in a new tab) and II.Work Reports (opens in a new tab) and III.weekly report (opens in a new tab) can be found. Another piece of evidence for work records is that for projects I worked on, there are Github Commits, which I can't make public because they are private company repositories, but they should be accessible to judicial officers. I used annual or sick leave and requested it in advance, followed the procedure of sending an email or message in the Discord channel, and filled out a Google calendar. 3.
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In view of the fact that the "boss of the company I work for now wrote a list of things he was not happy with and asked me to write a review", I hereby declare that, because of the factual inconsistency and suspicion of a violation of the law, I refuse to acknowledge and sign any subsequent documents provided by the company, officially or unofficially, including the documents described in the previous paragraph. As stated above, I am not bound by the rules of "no tape recording of meetings", "no disclosure of Discord or e-mail records" or similar rules. Any statement of such rules or restrictions issued by my current company after October 10, 2023, claiming that I signed them and should abide by them, is not true. If the company can produce evidence to that effect, none of them were signed voluntarily by me and were coerced, forged, or other similar circumstances. **I didn't sign an NDA (because they forgot to ask me to sign it when they started), it's not in my contract, and it's not in the employment rules (they didn't bother to amend and add it). So I'm not afraid of getting in trouble with them. **
Power harassment related chain of evidence
The boss of the company I am now working for has been PUA(power harassment) on me for a long time, making me take the blame, causing my depression symptoms to worsen and schizophrenia. At the same time, he has intentionally used my dead name and the wrong gender to address me. The chain of evidence for this is organized as follows.
Power harassment in the FoodPlatingAI Project
This mainly happened in late 2022 ~ end of February 2023.
I completed my work on time as a backend engineer. And provided easy front-end Demo for front-end access. My boss said to me, "Just because you say you finished doesn't prove you finished, I didn't confirm it". Of course, he only needed to confirm my simple demo, and if he wanted to do more testing, he should have told me. But the company doesn't have any specific rules about QA, so I think I can report that I did my job.
He is not happy that the front-end part was not completed on time, and he is not happy with the front-end design. According to the recording made during the meeting of this project (refer to the recording evidence on One Drive), I was not the Leader of this project, the Leader of the project was another colleague.
However, my boss criticized me for my lack of responsibility, and that I, as a full-time employee and as an employee who has been involved in the project from the very beginning, should be held primarily responsible for the failure of the project.
I would like to clarify that I am a back-end engineer and not a Project Manager, so I have no obligation to manage the progress of the project or to urge my front-end colleagues to finish it as soon as possible.
As supporting evidence: I will explain the objective reasons for the failure of the project as follows: the front-end does not have any design documents. There was no design document for the front-end. The design documentation was dictated by the boss. The boss is a selective forgetful person and often comes up with unrealistic ideas like "make an Instgram style website". There weren't even any Figma-type drawings. Just some hand-drawn drafts that can't be called design drawings. If you hadn't been to the project meeting, you wouldn't have known what these drafts, which looked like ancient Egyptian frescoes, meant. Of course this is the front-end part. I don't really write front-end.
Make an Instgram style website
! Doing an Instgram style website
Ancient Egyptian fresco-like drafts
! Ancient Egyptian frescoes in general draft
As for the whole project, because of the failure of the business (the boss probably doubled as the business himself), the development direction of this project changed twice, and the target customer changed once, swinging from B2B to B2C.
However, the boss had PUA (power harassment) on me, which led to the worsening of my depression and serious self-injurious behaviors (TW WARNING This is a picture of I got infected because of improper wound treatment after I cut my hand - One Drive (opens in a new tab)), OD tendencies, and strong suicidal ideation, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a subsequent diagnosis. This is what my doctor told me: "The worsening of your condition and schizophrenia are directly related to the workplace environment "**.
As a transgender person, I was deliberately called both dead name and the wrong gender by my boss during this time (Refer to DISCORD chat logs as evidence - refer to the Github link in this entry (opens in a new tab)).
In addition, as a "schizophrenic", but also during this period was forced to burst the cabinet, my "schizophrenic" view of this matter is as follows: because of the end of the year tax adjustments need to submit information to the company, the company knows that I am a "mentally challenged person". The company knew that I was a "mentally challenged person", which coincided with the start of a series of PUAs (power harassment). Obviously, as mentioned earlier, the failure of the project was inevitable. I think that my boss was discriminating against transgender people and mentally challenged people, and that he was just using this as a way to put the blame on me so that I could leave the company.
Regardless of whether or not this motivated assumption is correct, the existence of PUA (power harassment) is evidenced by DISCORD chat logs, some of which I have excerpted from the original text below:
Translated by Deep Learning Translate
What the heck is going on with food plating? I think I was very strict with you at the last mtg, but there was no progress report at all. I think I told you that the worst deadline was the end of January and we all shared it, but I still have not received anything and I am very unhappy. We have already had a significant delay at the last mtg, and I have strongly asked you to share the progress with us on a case-by-case basis. I am going to talk to an actual potential client here tomorrow and I have nothing to show them and I have not tested anything. I am really confused. Also, this kind of workmanship is unacceptable. If it's not done, Mr. Dye should report that beforehand, and even if it was done, he hasn't tested it or asked me how to use it or anything. What would you think if you were in the opposite position, or in the customer's shoes? Would you really take it seriously? Anyway, please report the situation immediately. We are at our limit. If you can't do the bare minimum, I can't entrust you with the project, and I will have to consider asking you to leave. Not only in this case, but also in your daily work, there is too little sharing and reporting of your work. Please seriously think about how you work. It's really not good.
Isn't that a little strange? You said the deadline was the end of January and that it should be a top priority, right? Don't you think it's strange that there's no report on the way? Shouldn't a full-time person be responsible for that, instead of leaving it to a part-time person? And if you don't even know when it will be ready at this point, it's not really a job, is it?
That's not right. I think it's not right. Mr. Tamahashi is not the leader of this project, and he's only helping Yuzuki because Yuzuki didn't get it done the other day. I'm working right in front of him every day, but we're not communicating at all? I think you're leaving too much to others.
That's being too lenient. He's only helping you because Yuzuki couldn't do it. He can't do it because he's too busy with other projects too. You can see that in the weekly mtg and morning meetings, can't you? If you don't understand, you should properly ask yourself, period.
I know that I came all the way to France but I can't do it and that I have nothing to show, so I can't help it, so I'm going to go over here and apologize to everyone. To be honest, it's really bad, but most of all, Yuzuki, you need to take more responsibility for this project. I want you to take more responsibility for your own work instead of leaving it to part-timers or others, and whether you can do it or not, I think it could have been prevented if you had communicated more with those around you. I want them to understand that.
I think anyone with common sense in Japanese can see that these statements are terrible.
Power harassment in the PD project
As the Discord chat logs say, "The program is not a program that can be reviewed," I was de facto kicked out of the PD program, which I had been involved in from the very beginning as an architect and CI/CD.
De facto kicked out means: I was no longer allowed to attend regular meetings. No longer maintaining the CICD. I was assigned to work on other shit-hill projects/fringe projects or to "realize" my boss's "let's make a Chatgpt app too" kind of brainstorming ideas.
Of course, this kind of destabilization of the team seems puzzling to the average person. You can only explain it by my mentioning that "the boss is discriminatory against "transgender" and "mentally challenged" themselves, and is just using this as a way to push the pot on me in order to get me to leave on my own." Isn't it.
You can't bring charges against ignorance, but ignorance is also bullying.
Power harassment in SupermarketAI project
After the above incident, Cat felt that it is necessary to make regular backups of Discord chat records and E-Mail records, as well as to record the meetings and document the requirements and design styles reached in the meetings and confirm them by emails for many times. Even though I'm not a project manager or product manager, I actually started doing these things. Thus forming a very complete chain of evidence.
On August 29, 2023 there was a scheduled review meeting of the product itself, with just me and my boss, and it took place in the conference room next door to the office. No one else was present in the conference room. I recorded the meeting using a voice recorder.
The meeting did not go as "planned", but turned into criticism and personal attacks on me, and was completely untrue. The boss rudely claimed that "he had the right to decide the subject matter of the meeting" when I suggested that "the meeting had gone off topic". Link to full version of recording on One Drive - 230829_1409.wav (opens in a new tab).
For this recording evidence, I will point out its factual inconsistencies and power harassment in conjunction with the evidence of E-Mail communications, Evidence of E-Mail communications can be found at this Github repository (opens in a new tab).
- my boss said that I should be primarily responsible for the delays in the SupermarketAI project. I pointed out that, first of all, I completed my part on time and the delay was caused by the AI part, which was assigned to the AI department to do. I, as a coworker, have repeatedly and kindly reminded the person in the AI department who is responsible for this part of the work ([Refer to this email as evidence] (https://github.com/yuzukicat/evidence.yuzuki/blob/main/V-email-pipeline/2023/5/15/1881d57b7a421ea1.mht (opens in a new tab))).
The AI prediction for overlaying daily sales at specific times (e.g., 12, 15, 17) will be handled by Mark, not me. I will be responsible for visualizing the data provided by Mark, which should be in CSV format.
And since I am not the Project Leader (refer to the email evidence, and the boss himself admitted this in the later recording), I have no obligation or authority to push (or some kind you call it 'push') my colleagues in the AI department. However the boss insisted that I had the main responsibility and that there was a communication problem and that I didn't communicate the priority of this project clearly (refer to recorded evidence).
- humiliation of my ability to do my job as an engineer. The boss's claim was that the work was not done completely independently, that it was all done with the help of my coworker Edward, and that my coworker C contributed the most, while I barely contributed at all. Putting aside the question of whether this was a deliberate attempt to humiliate my ability to do my job as an engineer or whether his selective amnesia was acting up again. His exact words were: "I can not see your contribution". Anyway, this is a very typical PUA (Power harassment).
I tried my best to restrain my nervousness and anxiety in this meeting and refuted accordingly. First of all, Edward's joining the program was a request from the boss himself, and I even in this email (opens in a new tab) with concerns and objections.
I think we should not rely too heavily on part-timers. I think a coworker at the company or Edward himself could testify as human testimony that the boss asked Edward to join at the company's weekly meeting. Then the claim of "relying too heavily on part-timers" doesn't hold water. I just obeyed the work arrangement.
Then, regarding Cr's contribution, if you have read about Power harassment in the FoodPlatingAI Project you will understand that it is just a management confusion. Because Cr's work product completely deviated from the original design brief, the project was developed according to the design pattern that was resolved in the original meeting and confirmed by email, but as I said, the company was too agile and after Cr presented a demo at one point, the original design pattern was in fact discarded, even though we spent a lot of time doing a lot of preliminary work. There was no formal written documentation of the style change, not even I knew about it (because Cr communicated directly with the boss), and I was baffled that the product eventually adopted Cr's solution and didn't match the design style. Of course, from a certain point of view, this may be just a matter of "visibility of project members' contributions", but regardless of the motivation, the existence of PUA (Power harassment) is a fact.
Lastly, as I said, including in the previous post, this is a shit mountain of a project that I threw over after I was de facto kicked out of the PD program. The original leader of the project left last year and the project code was heavily buggy (if you read Power harassment in the FoodPlatingAI Project you know that as I mentioned the company has no clear QA standards). Myself and other team members (including Edward, Zhao, Yifan) put a lot of time and effort into fixing pre-existing bugs, and that work was documented by Github Commits. The boss can't and won't read the Github Commits, which are "invisible" work. Even though I have reported this to my boss, he still "selectively forgets" this fact. A colleague in the AI department and Leader of the project insisted that "the data has already been cleaned" (refer to this email (opens in a new tab)).
The data itself is already processed and cleaned. In fact it has not been cleaned so we have to write extra code to do the data cleaning. Of course I am not a data engineer. I emailed and verbally reported this to my boss several times but was selectively forgotten. In a meeting with the AI department, I asked "what's the difference between raw data and cleaned data" and the AI department responded. This was another admission that the data had not been cleaned. Refer to the minutes of this meeting (opens in a new tab) what is the difference between raw data and the cleaned up
This transcript is a recording of the meeting followed by a translation from the OpenAI Whisper speech-to-text model. Meeting recording on One Drive - 230802_1255.wav (opens in a new tab). In the meeting, the AI department itself acknowledged the existence of the extension and explained it accordingly. But as in the CatCat statement, the boss has so far PUA(Power harassment) me and told me that the delays were caused by my lack of responsibility and that I should be held primarily responsible (take the blame).
Recent Power harassment
The above are just some of the PUA (Power harassment) incidents for which evidence can be presented. In fact, there are a lot of verbal, unrecorded, and unemailed PUA (Power harassment) incidents. I even speculate that the motive might just be Gas Light mentally challenged people for fun. Because Edward has also suffered similar harassment. Edward can be used as a human witness if he is willing to come forward and speak out. Even though Edward has left his job and returned to the US.
Even this malice is too blatant: Refer to this email, for example. I only used my annual leave to take a reasonable amount of time off for a doctor's appointment and requested it a week in advance. My boss intentionally denied it and PUA'd me, saying, "The company has the right to deny it", "There are rules in RTFM about taking leave two weeks in advance", "You have a task to do. "Be busy. The fact is that if the company doesn't grant annual leave and I can't attend for personal reasons, the company should deduct the appropriate hours from my paycheck. And you can't find the requirement to apply for it two weeks in advance in your RTFM (I'm serious I read the thing over before I started). Disgusting you in a boring place like this is probably a form of island bullying, and it's a stretch to say that it's in the RTFM so why don't you find it????? I had to beg and plead with him, so he agreed verbally (without formally emailing me back). Refer to this recording - 230904_1635.wav (opens in a new tab), documenting the entire conversation. Of course as a diagnosed schizophrenic, I suspect that he intentionally approved the leave verbally but didn't formally return the email, and if I had gone to the doctor's office I couldn't produce written evidence that he had approved it, and the matter would have become one of my unbroken absences from work.
The regular presence of PUA (Power harassment) is a personal attack on me in the name of the collective, which is also present in the recording of Power harassment in the FoodPlatingAI Project. The tactic is : "You ... , that's what everyone thinks". Now that I think about it, I have to say that this type of speech can be very damaging to ASD cats and kittens. Because as an ASDer I would have wondered if I wasn't doing a good enough job of socializing, and now my boss is standing in a position of authority and saying: "Everyone thinks it's because you don't communicate well enough that the project is failing/postponed", which makes me very self-loathing, hating myself, and feeling a strong sense of isolation, and feeling like I don't deserve to be to live. At one point I asked him, "You say everyone thinks that, so can you call everyone over to vote on the opinion? He seemed to be angry with me all day for that backhanded remark. When I'm in a slightly better state of mind, or when my sanity is on the line (ASDers are easily provoked or led by the other person to admit to something they haven't done wrong, probably similar to being entrapped into a confession, and you might notice the insidious nature of this type of bullying and harassment in the recording of Power harassment in the FoodPlatingAI Project) I'll retort a couple of times. However, I now feel that no matter what I do, it probably won't help, and that if I'm GAS Light, I'll always be GAS Light, so I'm probably just a backstabber.
After I asked for help, one of my friends told me that, first of all, the company should assign you to a job that suits your ability or provide you with appropriate training. The company can fire you for lack of ability, but it doesn't have the right to criticize you. All this time I didn't realize this.
Actually, there's one other thing that there's no physical evidence of unless a part-time employee is willing to come forward and testify. I've been put to work for long hours (>2 hours a day some days) picking up deliveries, taking out the garbage, organizing delivery cartons, and the like, which is not only harassment of authority under civil law, but also a violation of the Immigration Act's requirement that you can't work outside of the requirements of the type of visa you're on. I can report it, and if verified, the company I'm staying at now will be fined. I'm wondering if I should retaliate.
I was diagnosed with schizophrenia by a doctor at Keio University Hospital on April 6, 2023 and was prescribed Sulpiride on June 1, 2023 and started taking antipsychotic medication. As my doctor said:** "The worsening of your condition and schizophrenia are directly related to the workplace environment "**. My boss's PUA (Power harassment) led to the exacerbation of my depressive symptoms, including underneath my self-esteem, moodiness throughout the day, inability to stop crying, self-injurious behaviors (**this picturethis picture (opens in a new tab), which as you can see from the background took place at the company's workstation), strong suicidal ideation, and dissociation (which severely impacted my daily life).
Trying to seek legal assistance
I am not familiar with Japanese law, so I am seeking help.
I have not left the company I am currently working for and I am still working. Since I left my job for my own reasons, it will be recognized as a personal reason by my employment insurance, and it is clear that the company and its owner are at fault.
Regarding my Japanese language skills, I can understand Japanese people, but I don't look like I understand them because of the as feature, I can express myself clearly in spoken language, and I got almost perfect score in N1.
I want to know these things.
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whether it is best practice for me to leave the delivery that my boss sends to my house unattended, or whether I should sign for it - this list of things that I am unhappy with could constitute evidence of PUA (Power harassment) in itself.
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the chances of success in suing or labor arbitration based on the evidence available so far, and if the success rate is low, whether other means of struggle are possible (with the aim of exploding his gold coins or bringing the incident to light).
Legal claims
Sue or labor arbitration
Sue the owner of Eyes, Japan, Mr. Jun Yamadera, for the fact that his employee, Yuzuki (has a long history of PUA (Power harassment)), has been in a situation where he has been in a situation where he has been in a situation where he has been in a situation of PUA (Power harassment) for a long period of time. We request that the employment contract be terminated as soon as possible on the basis of the company's fault for the principle of protection, compensation for moral damages of 10monthly salary0.7, and payment of severance pay (1+1)*monthly salary.
Sue or labor arbitration to reach a settlement
Letter of apology.
Retain the original position and authorize a 6-month leave of absence. During the period, the company continues to pay insurance and annuity according to the lowest first grade. Social insurance pays the corresponding injury and illness insurance benefits. reinstatement after 6 months depending on recovery or separation for personal reasons.