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　このブログでも何度か報じているトヨタ過労死裁判原告内野博子さんのたたかいがニューヨークタイムスで「The end of blind loyalty to bosses　ボスへの盲目的な忠誠心の終演」と題して報道された。レイバーネットMLからの転載。

The end of blind loyalty to bosses

In Japan, where employee loyalty to the company is close to legend,
despairing workers are fed up and striking back
By Martin Fackler
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, TOKYO
Saturday, Jun 14, 2008, Page 9



ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

Japan’s salarymen, famous for their work ethic and their corporate
loyalty, fueled their nation’s industrial rise. But more recently,
they have borne the brunt of its economic decline, enduring lower
wages, job insecurity and long hours of unpaid overtime.

Now, a few are fighting back, like Hiroshi Takano.

For years, Takano regularly worked into the wee hours as a store
manager at McDonald’s Japan. With his health deteriorating and the
company, which operates many restaurants here, refusing to pay
overtime, Takano sued three years ago and won.

In January, a Tokyo court ordered McDonald’s Japan to pay him US
$75,000 in back overtime wages. Last month, the company announced it
would pay more overtime to store managers.

Slowly and reluctantly, Japan’s salarymen are learning to stand up
for their rights, and in the process rewriting the social contract
that had once bound workers to companies with near feudal bonds of
loyalty. While this renegotiation is still under way, a new
generation of Japanese like Takano is seeking to limit the demands of
employers with more US-style legal protections. These changing
attitudes reflect a broader shift as Japan, Asia’s first high-growth
success story, struggles to mature into a postindustrial economy.

“Japanese are being forced to think more about their self-interest,
which is something they are not used to doing,” said Yoichi Shimada,
a law professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. “People are slowly
realizing there are legal avenues to defend themselves if they feel
wronged.”

According to the Supreme Court, the number of lawsuits filed against
employers rose 45 percent between 1997 and 2005 to 2,303 cases. In
2006, that number increased 21 percent to 2,777 cases — if lawsuits
heard by a newly created labor arbitration court are included.

Adding to the alienation between employee and company has been a
growing sense of resentment that workers have not benefited from the
nation’s economic rebound in the last five years.

STAGNANT

While corporate profits have soared, wages have remained stagnant,
feeding a perception that companies have failed to share the good
times with employees. This has led some to seek a bigger piece of the
pie, say legal and labor experts.

There is also a feeling that as companies have cut costs to remain
competitive with China and South Korea, they passed too much of the
burden onto employees. In particular, many of the recent lawsuits
involve a practice known as “service overtime,” in which workers
were silently pressured into logging long hours of unpaid overtime as
a display of loyalty, labor experts say.

“Japanese companies have used the silence of their loyal employees
as a weapon in international competition,” said Kiyotsugu Shitara,
head of the Tokyo Managers’ Union, a small white-collar union that
helped with Takano’s lawsuit against McDonald’s Japan.
“Employees are tired of being used like that.”

Shitara and other labor experts said the recent rise in lawsuits was
also the latest step in a longer-term move toward a more US-style
workplace — also apparent in the recent rise in mid-career job
hopping, once a rarity here.

Still, many employees involved in the lawsuits describe themselves as
reluctant revolutionaries, dragged into a new, more legalistic era to
which they have no choice but to adapt.

Some, like Takano, blame the indifferent attitudes of companies for
forcing them to fight back when they would just as soon return to the
old, cozy relationship between employer and employee.

“I didn’t want to do this,” said Takano, 46, who still manages a
McDonald’s store in a Tokyo suburb. “The company was treating me
too coldly, so I had to start protecting my own rights.”

Another reluctant plaintiff was Hiroko Uchino, who filed a lawsuit
against the government after her husband, Kenichi, 30, a quality
control officer at Toyota, died at his office six years ago. Uchino
wanted a government labor agency to legally recognize that he had
died from overwork, something so common that there is a Japanese word
for it, karoshi.

LEGAL ACTION

She took legal action after the company said her husband’s death was
not because of overwork, and that he had only worked about 38 hours
of overtime in January 2002, the month before he died. She said the
company ignored her when she tried to submit gas station receipts and
other evidence to show he had worked much longer hours: 155 that
January, by Uchino’s calculation. She said the company said he
stayed after work voluntarily, and was not entitled to overtime pay.

Despite her outrage, Uchino could not bring herself to legally
challenge the auto giant, which dominates the central city of Nagoya
where she lives, and had employed not only her husband but his father
and grandfather before him. She sued the labor agency instead to
receive more of his overtime pay.

Uchino’s case won wide sympathy, including a meeting with the labor
minister, who gave her words of support. In March, a court in Nagoya
ruled her husband’s death had been work-related, and that he had
worked 93 hours of overtime in his final month, entitling his widow
to additional overtime pay. Toyota had no comment on the case.

“His father would never have turned to the courts, no matter
what,” said Uchino, 38. “But Toyota never would have treated him
this way, either. These days, all the company talks about is reducing
expenses.”

She added: “If my husband had known how the company would react, he
never would have shown all this fruitless loyalty.”

Takano said he had been working from 6am to 1am managing two stores
before his lawsuit, in some cases seven days a week. McDonald’s
Japan said that as a white-collar manager he was not entitled to
overtime pay. After a doctor warned him he was at risk of a stroke,
Takano said he had wavered on whether to file a lawsuit — he liked
McDonald’s and wanted to keep his job. Now, he hoped the case would
improve working conditions for all managers.

The company had no comment on the case.

After the court victory, four other former McDonald’s store managers
filed a similar suit demanding compensation for unpaid overtime.
Legal experts say more could come throughout the fast-food industry.

“I want Japan to become a society where employees can sue their own
company,” Takano said. “That’s why I’m doing this.”