Japan Press Weekly

Tweet

2015 March 18 - 24 [LABOR]

Large corporations reject even Rengo’s timid wage hike demands

Japan’s major auto and electronics makers on March 18 rejected a basic monthly wage increase of 6,000 yen that Rengo-affiliated unions demanded in this year’s spring wage struggle, turning their back on calls for putting a stop to wage declines and realizing a positive economic cycle.

Toyota Motor, which expects a record operating profit of 2.7 trillion yen for the fiscal year ending on March 31, offered a basic pay raise of 4,000 yen. Nissan and Honda offered to their workers a basic monthly pay hike of 5,000 yen and 3,400 yen respectively.

In the electronics sector, Hitachi which will earn a record profit of 580 billion yen, along with Panasonic and Toshiba, offered to their unions a pay raise of 3,000 yen per month. Sharp only agreed to an annual pay raise.

In the 2015 spring wage bargaining round, there were expectations that unions could win a substantial wage due to the higher prices of goods and services associated with the consumption tax rate increase and the weaker yen.

At the early stage of the spring talks, the Japan Business Federation told the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo), representing unions at major manufacturers, that the economic impact of the sales tax hike to 8% from 5% should not be included in a wage talks agenda. Rengo President Koga Nobuaki expressed his conciliatory position saying, “As the consumption tax is designed to have burdens shared among the people, the impact of the tax hike should not be reflected in unions’ demands automatically.”

Rengo-affiliated unions, then, decided to demand a 2% increase in basic wages in this year’s wage talks, while consumer prices increased by 2.6% in 2014. Nevertheless, large corporations refused to meet even this moderate demand.

In contrast, a major German metalworkers’ union, the Industrial Union of Metalworkers (IG Metal) in February reached an agreement with an employers’ organization to increase monthly salaries by 3.4%, almost four times higher than Germany’s inflation rate of 0.9%. The union achieved this outcome through various measures, including strikes, and by setting an ambitious goal of a 5.5% pay hike.


Past related article:
> Will Rengo’s moderate pay claim really meet workers’ needs? [February 4, 2015]
> Rengo supports Noda gov’t consumption tax hike plan [February 18, 2012]