Tokai Branch History

I. 1991-96: The Early Years in Tokai

The General Union was formed in Kansai in 1991. Its first members here in Tokai joined in the wake of the bankruptcy of a large EFL operation, Atty Language Institute, in April1994. Atty employees in Nagoya came to the Union for help with obtaining unpaid wages, severance pay, and benefits from the state Unemployment Insurance Scheme. More people joined when an even larger school called Bilingual closed its doors later the same year. The GU was able to obtain payments of salary owed to Bilingual's teachers from the government's Wages Protection Fund. This was the first time foreign workers in Japan had been able to benefit from this fund. From then on, a steady stream of requests for help from foreign teachers working in the Nagoya area trickled in to the GU's Osaka Head Office. Because of the distance involved however, the Union could sometimes do no more than offer advice by telephone. Without Union staff based in Nagoya, we were not in a position to resolve all the grievances that came to us. A Union office clearly needed to be set up in Tokai. Accordingly, the then General Secretary of the GU had several meetings with language teachers and officials of other Unions in Nagoya in late 1996 and early 1997 to discuss setting up a sister Union here. In a local press article, he explained thus the need for such an organisation: "Employers in Nagoya have had easy going for years...I suspect that most of their contracts contain violations of the law. It's time to put employers on notice - they need to be more careful and professional" ("Local teachers look to establish a union", The Chubu Weekly, February 13, 1997).

II. 1997-98: the Tokai International Union

The GU's members in our area officially founded the Tokai International Union on March 17, 1997. Although it was an independent union, not a GU Branch, it would work in close co-operation with the GU and receive considerable assistance from it. Both the GU's Chair and its then General Secretary were on the TIU executive committee. Through the GU's connection with the Takarabune food workers' Union, the TIU was provided with a rent-free office in Nagoya's Chikusa Ward.

The TIU's main theatre of operations was Chubu ECC, where a dispute over paid flexible holidays led to the formation of a large Union Branch in 1997. A campaign, mounted jointly with GU Kansai ECC Branch, of leafleting students outside the company's schools, together with rolling strikes (i.e. strikes in which one teacher per day ceased work for one hour), brought victory in November 1997. ECC agreed to grant employees paid holidays in line with the Japanese Labour Standards Law, and apologised to the Union for the intransigence which had led to the dispute. There was another Union campaign at ECC in 1998. This year saw the achievement of unemployment insurance for all staff and the restoration of December 25 and 26 as paid vacation days.

Despite the successes at ECC, the TIU had serious weaknesses. ECC Branch virtually was the TIU at this time, and there seemed to be no prospect of expanding beyond it. Moreover, the Branch lacked staff with Japanese ability and sufficient union organising experience. To survive and expand, it seemed that the best option for the TIU was to join the General Union, in order to benefit from the help of its experienced and bilingual staff.

III. 1998 - 2000: The General Union Tokai Branch from its Formation to its Nadir

At the TIU's Annual General Meeting on June 21, 1998, the Union's members voted in favour of the proposal to join the General Union. The TIU then became an area-based Branch of the GU (hitherto all GU Branches had been company-based). The official title of TIU ECC Branch consequently changed to GUTIU ECC Chapter. (However, in practice, the term "Branch" has continued to be applied both to area-based structures such as GUTIU and to company-based ones such as ECC Branch, GEOS Branch, etc.)

Once our members had agreed to join the GU, the details of the two organisations' relationship had to be worked out. It was decided that GUTIU Branches/Chapters and their Kansai counterparts would jointly submit demands to companies, that the GU Executive Committee would be responsible for all TIU funds, and that GU Head Office staff would spend at least two days a month in Nagoya to help run the Branch here.

EEC Branch continued to be the mainstay of our Union in this period. Membership records for 1999 show that about two thirds of the GUTIU's members were at ECC then. These included the GUTIU Branch Chair and the Branch Treasurer. Annual campaigns at ECC continued, with further strikes there in 1998 and 1999. These led to an agreement between the company and the Union on a procedure for dealing with staff grievances. This important benefit was won despite the company's attempts to intimidate our members and its use of non-Union labour to break the strikes. Present-day ECC teachers would do well to bear in mind that the improvements in their working conditions in 1997-99 sprang not from their management's generosity, but from a struggle conducted on their behalf by our Union.

Another notable Union achievement in Tokai during this period was the settlement of a case involving a member of GEOS' Japanese staff. She had taken GEOS to court because it had refused to pay her for overtime. After she joined the Union, it collected money to help defray her legal expenses and leafleted students outside GEOS schools. It also filed an unfair labour practices case against the company at Osaka Labour Commission in July 1999, with the aim of forcing GEOS to agree to a settlement. This strategy proved to be a resounding success, as GEOS settled in June 2000, and promised henceforth to obey the Labour Standards Law. It was about time. The record here clearly shows that the GU is not just a "foreigners' union"; it is committed to protecting the rights of ALL workers in Japan.

Despite such successes, the structural weakness of a Union organisation which depended so heavily on a single Branch/Chapter began to tell. From the year 2000, membership at ECC dwindled as long-time Union organisers left the company or returned to their home countries. At the same time, there were no major disputes or campaigns to spur incoming staff to join the Union. To this extent, it may be fair to say that TIU ECC Branch was the victim of its own successes in earlier years. By autumn 2001, only a handful of ECC employees remained in the Tokai Union, the majority of its members now being independents, and total GU membership in Tokai had fallen to less than twenty people.

IV.2001-2: GU Tokai Revives

After this low point however, GU Tokai began to revive. This was partly due to an accident of fate: in August 2000, a Union member at Grandom Academy in Nagoya was unfairly dismissed, and the GU forced her employer to pay her a substantial settlement. Her case prompted two other Grandom teachers to join the Union, and, in early 2001, she and her ex-colleagues began working to restore the GUTIU to its former glory. They made intensive efforts to publicise the Union and resumed the day-to-day work of consultations, recruiting, and so on. However, the main credit for the GU's re-emergence as an effective organisation in Tokai must still go to staff at Osaka Head Office. Our efforts would have been in vain without their generously given time, energy, and expertise.

2002 has so far been a good year for Union organising, with a significant rise in membership in the first half of the year. In March, we held the first Union General Meeting in the Tokai area since June 1999. In July 2002, another GU Tokai workplace Branch was declared at Linguaphone Academy in Nagoya. Since the declaration, we have held strikes at the company in order to force it to withdraw the unfair firing of one of our members. At the same time, we have used administrative channels to force it to offer legal working conditions to its foreign staff. After complaints by us, Shinjuku Labour Standards Office ordered the company to obey the Labour Standards Law and Hello Work ordered it to enrol its foreign staff on the national unemployment insurance scheme. We are confident that the unfair firing case will be resolved in the near future.

We are no longer a Union centred on one company. We still have to rely on Osaka Head Office a lot, but we are slowly acquiring more experience and picking up the Japanese terms we need for union work. Membership growth has slowed recently, but we are confident that increased publicity in Nagoya and campaigning at major EFL employers (we will be leafleting ECC, NOVA, Berlitz, and KTC regularly) will in time bear fruit.