Japan Press Weekly

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2012 March 28 - April 3 TOP3 [LABOR]

Non-regular workers win Sony’s retraction of dismissals

Sony’s fixed-term contract workers in Sendai City in Miyagi Prefecture have successfully forced the company to retract their dismissals supposedly necessitated by the negative impact on corporate profits due to the 3.11 massive earthquake and tsunami.

They are members of the Sony workers’ union Sendai branch, affiliated with the Japanese Electrical Electronic & Information Union. In a collective bargaining session on March 28, the electronics giant agreed to accept responsibility for their employment until they find full-time jobs.

Sony plans to sell its optical film production site (where the workers are assigned) by the end of May. In the agreement, the company will maintain their employment status till the end of June and support their efforts to find other employment. If the workers cannot find a new job by then, it will offer them a full-time position at its subsidiary cleaning company in Sendai City and continue to support their job search.

In April and May last year, the company announced that it will dismiss all 150 fixed-term contract workers at the Sendai factory. After that, 22 workers joined the union and continued negotiations with the employer in order to get the dismissals retracted. Right now, 12 of them remain in the union.

Most of the factory workers on fixed-term contracts did the same job as their co-workers on full-time contracts for over 5 years. Claiming that they have the legal right to be designated as regular employees, they have argued that the company has more than enough assets to keep them employed, pointing out that it pays an annual salary of 882 million yen to its CEO Howard Stringer alone.

The union members have visited Tokyo many times to hold street petitions in front of Sony’s corporate headquarters and in front of the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) building as well as to make representations to the parliamentarians. They have also participated in joint campaigns with JAL crewmembers and temporary employees of other major manufacturers who are engaged in court battles against unfair dismissals.

When Japanese Communist Party Upper House member Yamashita Yoshiki took up this issue in a Diet session in July last year, then Prime Minister Kan Naoto in response promised to question Sony on this matter. Since then, the Labor Ministry demanded action by the company more than 10 times. As a result, the company, being unable to go ahead with its unilateral dismissals, has renewed the workers’ contracts every month.

One of the unionized workers, Takada Ryo, 29, has taken part in trial production runs and mass production runs of Play Station 3. “Winning our right to employment is more significant than receiving monetary compensation. I believe we have achieved a historic victory for the labor movement,” he said.