NTT harasses progressive union members as warning

NTT East, one of the major local telephone carriers, is to use National Confederation of Trade Unions (Zenroren)-affiliated union workers as a warning to other NTT employees who have refused to accept the firm's restructuring plan.

Miyamoto Takeshi of the Japanese Communist Party on March 14 showed a House of Councilors committee an NTT East internal document and argued that the company's policy of ordering distant transfers to certain union members is a violation of workers' right to organize.

NTT East has pressed all 26,353 employees 50 years old and over to quit and be rehired by NTT Corporation's outsourcing subsidiaries at 70-percent of salaries they received previsouly.

In the internal document, an NTT reform administration team defines a part of the 824 workers who opted to stay at NTT East as excess personnel, and plans to utilize them without consent as adjusters in NTT East offices throughout Japan.

The team also regards more than a hundred people out of the 824 as Zenroren members whose decisions to remain in NTT East were influenced by their union. The company has given instructions to remove them from their daily work for a certain period of time and to make them a warning example by pushing them into an isolated center as a pretext for changing their skills.

JCP Miyamoto criticized that such action by NTT is against Article 7 of the Labor Union Law and is thus an unfair labor practice. (end)