[Last One Mile Union] "Take photos of resumes and resignation documents with your phone and shred them": Personal information management by CEO Makoto Watanabe

Going paperless is an important business improvement for companies. By implementing proper electronic contracting, access control, retention period management, and backups, you can reduce paper storage costs while improving searchability and security.

However, according to information provided to our union by a current employee of Last One Mile Co., Ltd., the method explained by Makoto Watanabe, Representative Director, Chairman, and CEO, during the company's labor training was not so much planned digitalization as it was "just take pictures and throw away all the paper."

Resumes are "all shredded"

I'll shred all the resumes. The past ones, too.

Scan all the employment oaths and shred everything.

Resumes and onboarding documents contain important employee personal information such as name, address, date of birth, phone number, educational background, work history, qualifications, family information, and emergency contacts.

Safely disposing of paper and migrating to appropriate electronic data is not a problem in itself. The issue is that, without checking which documents should be saved at what resolution, using whose device, to which storage destination, and with what permission settings, a blanket instruction of "all of them" is being given.

Whether it's clean or dirty, I'm not looking anyway.

After the interview, just have them take a picture with their mobile phone and send it to you. It doesn't matter whether it's saved neatly or sloppily, because you're never going to look at it.

Electronic storage is not simply a matter of having files exist. It requires that the text is legible, that the documents correctly correspond to the relevant individuals, that they can be searched when needed, and that alteration or accidental deletion can be prevented.

If you do not care about image quality or storage methods on the grounds that you "won't look at them anyway," what will you use as a basis to verify facts when a trial, labor tribunal, administrative investigation, workers' compensation claim, social insurance procedure, or internal investigation becomes necessary?

Even retirement documents can just be photographed with your phone and thrown away

Have you ever used resignation documents? If not, you don't need them. Just take a picture and shred them.

Why are people who have never even been in a lawsuit in the past getting documents? They will never use them.

The absence of lawsuits in the past does not guarantee that disputes will not arise in the future. Disputes concerning reasons for resignation, resignation dates, paid leave, unpaid wages, non-compete clauses, confidentiality, and the return of loaned items sometimes surface for the first time after resignation.

It is the same as deciding to cancel an insurance policy because you have never used it; you are turning the track record of no problems occurring into a basis for arguing that future evidence is unnecessary.

Were they taking pictures with their personal cell phones?

In the training, the expression "have them take pictures with their mobile phones and send them" is used.

It cannot be confirmed from the transcription alone whether it is a company-provided device or an employee's personal smartphone. However, if a personal device was used, there is a possibility that resumes or resignation documents remain in the device's photo app, cloud storage, backups, deleted folders, messaging apps, and the like.

If employee personal information was copied to unmanageable devices and clouds to save on paper locker costs, it didn't increase security through paperless operations, but merely increased the number of places where information is duplicated.

Public questions for Last One Mile, Inc.

1. Was the policy to collectively discard the originals of resumes, employment oaths, resignation letters, and other documents actually implemented?
2. Did you use your company-provided device or your personal device for taking photos or scanning?
3. Which system, folder, and cloud was the captured data saved to?
4. How many employees had access to the saved data?
5. Were there mechanisms in place to ensure there were no missing images, unreadable text, mistaken subjects, or accidental deletions?
6. Was there a procedure to completely delete data remaining on personal devices and personal clouds?
7. Have you checked the statutory retention period and the evidentiary value of each document with a lawyer or certified social insurance labor consultant?

Going paperless doesn't mean throwing everything away.

Proper digitization is not about turning paper into photos, but about maintaining the authenticity, readability, searchability, confidentiality, and preservation of records.

The explanation that "since it's never looked at, it can be messy" and "since it has never been the subject of a lawsuit, it can be thrown away" is not the streamlining of document management.

It is a decision to throw away records whose value is not apparent until they are needed, before they are needed.