Shut down 'isolation room': Sega's workers

In a symposium to discuss the issue of corporate restructuring and human rights violations, participants demanded that the "isolation room" of major video gamemaker Sega Corporation be closed immediately.

The symposium was held on June 3 in Tokyo by the All-Japan Metal and Information Machinery Workers' Union (JMIU), with about 200 people attending.

Sega has separated union activists from the rest of the workers on the grounds that they refused to comply with transfers to subsidiaries. Those separated workers were denied jobs and told to stay in an isolation room all day long. Workers who refused to apply for "voluntary" retirement following a factory closure, had their wages cut by 30 percent and were ordered to temporarily stay at home.

Sega workers said that they can no longer endure the company management continuing to rob them of their jobs by isolating them as a warning to others.

A lawyer for the Sega workers in the court struggle stressed that the constitutional rights to live and work must be applied to the company.

A jurist stated that although corporate restructuring is not rare in Europe, there is no such harsh violation of workers' human rights.

A JMIU representative pointed out that in the 1970s, the major aim of suppressing human rights by Japan's corporations was to oppress and eliminate activists, but now it shifted to one of smoothly enacting corporate restructuring.

The participants resolved to fight till they win the final victory. (end)