Japan Press Weekly

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2012 January 11 - 17 TOP3 [LABOR]

Union helps temps in banking to get their status improved

In large banks staffing many temporary workers, a financial workers’ union is gaining workers’ trust and helping them to keep their jobs.

In the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (BTMU), contract workers joined the union in a struggle against the company’s plan to terminate contracts with its nearly 400 temporary workers. In April 2011, the union had the bank offer alternative jobs at related companies for all 30 temps who wanted to continue working, including those who newly became union members. The previous wage level was maintained, and an average of one million yen lump sum per each was paid in severance to the 400 temps.

Of the BTMU’s 80,000 employees in Japan and abroad, 50,000 are non-regular workers.

The bank, receiving temporary workers from staffing agencies, has no legal employment relations with temporary workers, and has no legal obligation to engage in collective bargaining with them.

However, the bank is responding to requests for collective bargaining as a concerned party.

Urano Hiroshi, chair of the financial union’s Kinki chapter, said that the Worker Dispatch Law should be drastically revised to impose a legal obligation on recipients of temps to respond to requests for collective bargaining.

At a subsidiary of the Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Company, another recipient of temps, three union members who had their temporary work contracts discontinued in late March 2011 were reinstated to their former positions as directly hired employees.

They were among twenty temps whose contracts had been discontinued after nearly 10 years of service for the subsidiary. The company had labeled them as workers in “special jobs.” However, the Osaka Labor Bureau certified that they were actually engaging in general clerical work in which temps are not allowed to engage in for over 3 years. The labor bureau instructed the company to correct the illegal practice and reclassify their jobs.

The parent company was asked to be present at the collective bargaining negotiations. It was extraordinary for both the dispatcher and the recipient of temps to sit at the collective bargaining table. As a result, employment was secured by the company with the designation of new jobs.

The Sumitomo Trust and Banking Co., Ltd. imposed a work contract on its contract workers to accept dismissals if they failed to achieve their quota in the sale of the bank’s financial products. Japanese Communist Party lawmaker Daimon Mikishi took this up in the Diet in March 2010, and the Financial Services Agency subsequently instructed the bank to rewrite the contract.

The BTMU reportedly has plans to turn 6,200 temps in branches into directly-employed contract workers from January 2012. The union is demanding direct employment of all temps in the bank and equal treatment with regular employees.

Urano said, “Major banks obtain increased profits by hiring more temps than regular workers. It is time to raise public awareness of the importance of labor unions in breaking away from the established use of exploited labor.”