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Bread & Roses: Labor Commission Grants Rights to Uber Eats Union
SNA (Tokyo) — US President Joe Biden ensured that December 2, 2022, will go down as a dark day in the history of the US labor movement. He signed legislation that forces railway unions to accept a miserable contract, robbing them of their right to strike for better conditions. A week prior, the Tokyo Labor…
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Bread & Roses: Bosses Can’t Force Workers to Quit
SNA (Tokyo) — Kata-tataki, or taps on the shoulder, indicate a series of actions a boss takes to drive a worker to quit without outright firing them. It establishes that the subsequent contract termination is mutually agreed, as opposed to a unilateral and contestable firing. The legal jargon for such “shoulder tapping” is taishoku kansho. In this…
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Bread & Roses 「同一労働同一賃金」―裁判所はどう判断している？ Japan’s same-work-same-pay law fails to live up to its promise
Many laud Article 8 of the brand new Part-time/Fixed-term Employment Act as Japan finally recognizing the principle of same-work-same-pay. But one word in that article gave me pause: unreasonable. The Part-time/Fixed-term Employment Act (enacted in April 2020 for regular firms and small businesses a year later), prohibits unreasonable treatment of employees on regular and irregular/contingent…
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Bread & Roses: Do sex workers really have a choice?
On March 30, 2022, NHK Web News ran a story on how women driven to financial hardship due to the corona pandemic are increasingly turning to sex work. (https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20220330/k10013558231000.html) The report notes that sex workers’ “growing presence in busy urban neighborhoods has spurred police to take enforcement action but also to assign case officers to…
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Bread & Roses: Tragedy and Prison for a Pregnant Foreign Intern
In August 2018 at the age of 19, Le Thi Thuy Linh arrived in Japan to work as a jisshusei intern. Each day, she handled agricultural wastewater at a tangerine orchard in Kumamoto Prefecture. Japan’s rapidly ageing population has created a dearth of agricultural workers, forcing farmers to turn to young foreign interns like Linh…
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Bread & Roses: Remote Jobs Upend Work-Life Balance
SNA (Tokyo) — Remote work is no longer a remote concept. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen telework, work-from-home, and workations soar in the popular imagination, and indeed become a reality in many lives. The very meaning of work is undergoing a tectonic transformation before our eyes. So let’s look at…
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Bread & Roses: Are Actors “Laborers”?
SNA (Tokyo) — Suit-clad office workers, long-haul truck drivers, ramen shop food preparers, fake priests at faux churches, insurance solicitors, rice paddy farmers, maid cafe servers, security guards, nurses, train conductors, schoolteachers, nursery school caregivers, bank tellers, garbage collectors, plumbers, paralegals, social workers… How many megabytes would it take to list all jobs that occupy…
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Bread & Roses: Osaka Rules Against Taxi Dispatcher for Transphobic Dress Code
SNA (Tokyo) — We were told that the 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Act (EEOA) marked the “dawn” of a new age for female workers in Japan. No more could employers blithely set up special marry-and-leave retirement systems for their female employees, a practice that had been considered perfectly legal. Several amendments boosted the reach of…
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Bread & Roses: Overhaul Japan’s Immigration System
SNA (Tokyo) — During a May 30 demonstration in front of central Tokyo’s JR Takadanobaba Station, my labor union, Tozen Union, called upon the Japanese government to overhaul its immigration system and to protect the human rights of foreigners. We persisted despite a heavy downpour, joined by the two younger sisters of Wishma Sandamali, a…
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Bread & Roses: Covid, Not Olympics, Requires Our National Effort
SNA (Tokyo) — I teach a weekly class on social security theory at a nursing college. When I read comments from the aspiring nurses, I can see their passion for alleviating human suffering, as well as for the class, which is gratifying as a teacher. The Covid pandemic that has spread over the globe over…