Photo/Illutration Hiroshi Kawato, left, an attorney for the bereaved family, holds a news conference on April 9. (Sawa Okabayashi)

The bereaved family of a university student who committed suicide two months before starting a new job will seek compensation from a Panasonic Corp. affiliate, saying he suffered power harassment by a personnel manager.

The 22-year-old male university student committed suicide in February 2019, the family's attorney, Hiroshi Kawato, said at a news conference on April 9.

The student had been informally offered a job at Panasonic Commercial Equipment Systems Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Panasonic Corp. He was scheduled to start from April 2019 after he graduated from a university.

The attorney said the personnel division manager forced the student to post daily messages on a social networking service website designed for the prospective employees, where the manager also bullied him and other new hires.

The manager implied that he had the authority to assign employees in the workplace.

The company admitted that the manager's actions may have contributed to the student's suicide.

 “It is a fact that our recruiting official who had been giving the guidance went too far," said an official of Panasonic Commercial Equipment Systems. "We are partially responsible for the male student’s suicide.”

In Japan, many university seniors start their job searches before graduation and are informally offered positions with companies.

The Tokyo-based company registered all its 20 prospective employees on a SNS website as part of training programs.

The manager at that time had been asking the future employees to log in and post daily messages.

The attorney said the manager started to post tormenting messages on the SNS website against the new hires from July 2018. In one, he reportedly posted, “If you do not post messages, you should leave.”

Another time, he implied that they should give up their job offers, saying, “You are all just impediments.” He also suggested that they would need to "overwork" after entering the company.

The male student began voicing concerns about the job in January 2019 and then committed suicide. He told his friends, “It’s tough,” and “I want to die.”

The family's attorney has been investigating the case for about a year with the company’s cooperation and concluded that the manager’s harassment forced him to develop the mental disorder and later commit suicide.

The family plans to seek compensation from the company.

Prospective employees are not covered by the worker’s accident compensation insurance program even if they suffer from power harassment by the companies that offered them jobs. 

However, the power harassment prevention law requires major corporations from June to resolve such problems, including measures to protect job-hunting students.

The Panasonic affiliate official also said that the company established a promotion office last August to improve its corporate culture and prevent the same kind of problem from reoccurring. It offers a consultation service for prospective employees to notify company officials if they are being harassed.

 (This article was written by Sawa Okabayashi, Suguru Takizawa and Takashi Yoshida.)