$imul Academy
Doesn't provide all of its teachers with health insurance - Shakai
Hoken.
The NUGW is fighting for the rights of employees at the company but is
faced with
intransigence on the part of management......
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If you are thinking of looking for
work in
education in Japan, then there are quite a few things to consider, not
least of which are your rights as an employee and your status as an
immigrant worker. With this in mind a
few weeks back a Springer went out to help English teachers employed by
Simul Academy in
an ongoing dispute and the following is a brief account
and commentary by
our man Mercaders who was on the spot at Simul.
On Saturday 31 May on an unusually chilly and wet
afternoon here in Tokyo a dozen trade union activists from the National
Union of General Workers Foreign Caucus (NUGW-FWC) descended on Simul
Academy's Shinjuku school to leaflet and picket in support of teachers
who are fighting for basic rights guaranteed under Japanese law to full
time workers. One of the teachers in question has been employed at the
school for twelve years but still doesn't receive subsidised health
insurance from Simul - something known as Shakai Hoken in Japanese. Every person regardless of
nationality, over 20 years old, residing
in Japan is required to be enrolled in an approved Japanese government
Health Insurance Scheme and Pension fund.
Basically there are two systems, the first being the Employees` Health
Insurance and Pension (Shakai Hoken) for people
who are employed at a registered company or at a workplace with more
than 5 people if the workplace is not a registered company,and National Health
Insurance (kokumin kenko hoken) and National Pension (kokumin nenkin)
which is for the unemployed, self employed and retired. If you are not
enrolled in Employees’ Health and Pension Insurance (Shakai Hoken) you
are required to be enrolled in the national system.
Essentially Shakai Hoken consists of two parts - Employees’ Health
Insurance (kenko hoken) and the Employees’ Pension fund (kousei
nenkin). Shakai Hoken covers your health insurance, for example, 70% of medical costs are
covered and there is also a safety net so that medical costs don’t
exceed \80,100 a month. Further to this,
your pension is also covered whereby after paying in for twenty five
years workers are entitled to a full pension until their death, after
which surviving dependents receive payments.
This is what the NUGW-FWC members were asking Simul Academy for, but
their requests have fallen on deaf ears, and now it has become a case
of demanding Shakai Hoken from the employer. Negotiaitions have gone
nowhere, with management and union representatives facing off against
one another in meetings where school managers have had cirlces run
around them logically and have retreated, stonewalling, requesting
further meetings in order to buy time, rather than addressing issues
concretely. Finally exasperated, the union has resorted to strike
action, with random classes being hit by members. In response, Simul
has assigned scab labour to cover struck classes and has handed
out warnings to union members with the aim of intimidation and
preventing leafleting and picketing.
It was against this background that we entered the lions den on
Saturday (although Lion is perhaps somewhat a flattering description)
to face surly scabs on the fifteenth floor of the building who informed
myself and two other pickets that security had been called and that we
weren't to obstruct the entrance to the school. The pickets' reply was
polite and succinct in which they said that they would talk to security
and give them leaflets, hoping to win the sympathy of the poorly paid
men and women charged with ejecting people without health insurance
from the building. When the school manager arrived and told us to
leave, we asked why, were told that school rules prohibited
leafletting. School rules? Oh, no, building rules! Building rules? Show
us the documents! This all bought us time and while the manager and his
sidekicks went off to get the "rule book" we successfully leafleted
several students and staff while scabs ducked and dived, looked at the
ground and one particularly well built, well dressed chap literally
scuttled along facing the wall and into the school.
When the manager returned, he commented that the article prohibiting
our
activity was in Japanese, and of course, we couldn't read Japanese,
could we? Well, one of us could. Oh....dear. Nowhere in the booklet did
it state that union activity was prohibited on the premises and so this
bought us more leafletting time. Anyway, by this time security had
turned up, all one of them - a little guy who looked like he couldn't
secure a shed door. After some shouting and a heated exchange in which
the manager tried to warn one of the pickets - who wasn't on school
premises and who wasn't "at work" we retreated to the lobby on the
ground floor of the building to join other strategically placed
pickets.Shortly after we declared our action a success and moved off,
having talked to numerous students and successfully handed out most of
our leaflets.
The events that had unfolded as usual, were a cause for reflection, and
I thought about the hostile reception from fellow immigrant workers
when we first showed up. Scowling faces, surly comments, security
coming to get us and an utter refusal to engage in dialogue. The
teachers who crossed the picket line and the big guy scuttling along
like a scared rabbit to avoid fellow human beings with leaflets who
were fighting for something that he too would benefit from. The utter
intransigence of the school manager, who didn't have a logical leg to
stand on and who exposed his own servitude by mindlessly repeating
"building rules" and who ultimately resorted to threats via "warnings".
There are a number of things that could be concluded from what
happened, but it would take far too long to go into all of them here.
Suffice to say that one of the pickets summed it up while up on the
fifteenth floor. As a burly, surly, female teacher walked by
complaining about us - the one who had mentioned security, my comrade
turned to me and said that that kind of person acted strong, pretended
to be tough, but really, she was weak. She couldn't or wouldn't engage
in dialogue because she was in the wrong, and didn't have the courage
to admit it.
In short, FEAR here is the key word. Very few people who cross picket
lines are making a conscious political choice. Very few are outright
neo-cons - they are simply imbued with a sense of self-preservation,
the products of years of selfish individualism being fed through the
corporate owned media, the passive recipients of anti-union propaganda.
They justify their actions to themselves by imagining that if they take
a stand then the students will suffer, while ignoring the injustices
suffered by their fellow teachers. These people are hopelessly lost,
imagining that by keeping their heads down they will somehow benefit
from the fallout of the dispute or that the magnanimous management
won't fire them at some point in the future when there is an economic
crisis because they didn't rock the boat.
Ignorant of the wage-labour relationship at work they are apolitical,
amoral amoebas. FEAR is the driving force here. Actively
cultivated by the few to oppress the many and embodied in the lax
enforcement of employment laws by the Japanese authorities. This would
obviously lead to a discussion of labour law and the complexities
of case studies, however, it is enough to to
say that the law is also a part of the problem that people face. It is
written by the people in power, for the people in power and also has to
be fought against, used where it benefits people but challenged where
it works against them. The spineless teachers who keep their heads down
and don't want to get involved very often don't even realise that the
laws of the land are designed to keep them in their places and are not
there to benefit them. They need to be woken up.
We can only hope that little by little, with determination, the NUGW
members can draw more people into the dispute and those that are more
than amoebas can develop the courage to reject the labels coward and
scab.This can only be done with a concerted effort to put our arguments
forward in as logical and systematic ways as possible, in a polite
manner, encouraging those that are simply afraid, while introducing
those that do take steps to stand up for themselves and their fellow
human beings to the history of the labour movement and collective
politics.
As I made my way away from Simul Academy, I felt good that I had done
something, just a little bit, to help others, while knowing that one
day, in a time of need, they would help me. Do scabs know what that
feels like?
MERCADERS
NB.SPRING is not
affliliated to the NUGW in any way as some might imagine.
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