February 8, 2013
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2013 February 6 - 12 [LABOR]
Sony workers urge labor ministry to relieve them from company’s cruel retirement scheme |
They are employees of Sony’s Sendai Technology Center (Tagajo City, Miyagi Pref.) and its subsidiaries. Japanese Communist Party Dietmembers Tamura Tomoko and Takahashi Chizuko also took part in the meeting with the ministry.
A male worker in his 50s reported that between November and January, his boss held five private interviews with him. “Every time my boss said that there is no job for me, I felt that I was being urged to quit,” the worker said. In the interviews, what he was eventually offered was a transfer to a distant office with a different job assignment.
In the meeting, Sony workers’ union Sendai Branch chair Matsuda Takaaki revealed that Sony moves workers, who reject the company’s early retirement offer, to a section known by company workers as the “Risutora-beya (downsizing room)” in which targeted workers are isolated from other workers without being given any jobs until they leave the company.
Sony Group companies in Tagajo City, Tokyo, and Kanagawa’s Atsugi City also have so-called downsizing rooms. The total number of workers who have been transferred to that section in each company increased by 100 to 250 since last autumn.
At Sendai Technology Center, 14 workers have been relocated to the section for downsizing.
A male worker, who was moved there last year, said, “By keeping me sitting at my desk all day without anything to do, the company can claim that I make no contribution to the company so that I then have to suffer from lower job evaluations and wage cuts.”
The JCP in the Diet repeatedly took up major electronics companies’ harsh downsizing schemes and called on the government to take appropriate measures.
The Labor Ministry in January began conducting a hearing investigation about job-cut measures of those electronics giants. On January 29, the ministry released an investigation report stating that Sony uses no illegal measures to push workers to accept the company’s early retirement plan.
Sony plans to slash 2,000 jobs by the end of March this year.
Related past articles:
> JCP calls for an end to electronics makers’ forcible retirement policy [August 28, 2012]
> Labor minister intends to investigate harsh downsizing moves by major electronics firms [January 10, 2013]
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