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NUGW Tokyo Nambu - Nambu IEC Branch

There’s a Union at IEC

The National Union of General Workers Tokyo Nambu represents 4,000 workers, most of them working in the Minato-ku area, and is a member of a national union federation with over 250,000 members throughout Japan.

NUGW Tokyo Nambu has officially met with IEC for collective bargaining. The Tokyo Nambu IEC local was founded to improve the working conditions for teachers and the quality of education at the schools that we teach at.

You have legal rights that you may not be aware of. Here are two of the issues that were discussed in collective bargaining:

Paid Annual Leave

If you have been working for IEC on a four or five day a week contract for more than 6 months, you legally have 10 days of paid annual leave in addition to IEC’s personal leave/sick leave, and in addition to the fixed leave which IEC places in school vacation times. If you have been working on a 3 day a week contract for more than 6 months, you have the right to an additional 5 days of paid annual leave. If you worked for IEC in the previous academic year you also may have rights to an additional day of paid annual leave as well as the unused paid annual leave from last year.

Paid annual leave is a legal right that is entirely separate from a company’s fixed paid leave. IEC has admitted in writing to Tokyo Nambu following collective bargaining that the company is not legally able to fix employee paid annual leave, but that they will quickly take measures to do so. This involves electing an employee representative, something that the union does not recommend you allow this to be done as it removes some of your legal rights. The best representative for you is a union representative, one that acts the members’ collective interests rather than one acting the in interests of your employer. If IEC discusses setting up an election for an employee representative, no matter how convincing their arguments may seem to be, please take detailed notes and contact the union immediately.

Lunch Break

IEC and the schools that we work at require teachers to remain in their schools during their lunch. However, according to the Labor Standards Law, an employer must give their employees at the minimum a 45 minute break when working a 6 hour shift, and that you must have free use of that 45 minute break. Not being able to leave the school is an obvious violation of the free use provision.

Are you one of those who needed to use a personal leave or unpaid leave to run an errand such as going to the bank that could have easily be done at lunch? If so, or even if you’ve been denied the right to leave the workplace during your break and/or have been lead to believe that you were not able to leave your school because what was written down in the IEC Employee Handbook, please contact the union immediately as you may have a valid claim for unpaid wages. You may have a claim even if you “chose” to eat lunch with your students.

Additional Issues

In addition to these two points there are additional issues that affect all IEC teachers, whether or not they are continuing with IEC in the next academic year:

Did you know that your salary is due and payable in full 7 days after the end of your employment relationship with IEC? If your contract ends on March 25, you have the right to be paid in full by April 1, regardless of IEC’s pay period scheme.

For those intending on continuing with IEC, or that would continue with IEC if the working conditions were improved, you have the right to collectively bargain for a pay raise, a transparent grievance system free of teacher-only “flexibility”, and proper professional development including Japanese lessons for all IEC teachers. We work in a Japanese office, so it’s in the best interest of IEC, the BOE, and our schools for us to be able to better communicate with HTs and school staff.

There may be issues that are important to you that aren’t listed here. Join us and make your voice heard.

IEC’s Employee Handbook

What is written in your contract or in the Employee Handbook does not negate your legal rights. In fact, much of what’s written in the IEC Employee Handbook is legally invalid, misleading, or simply untrue. Here are two examples:

Your contract and the Handbook state that IEC has a five month probationary period. The legal limit for a probationary period according to the Labor Standards Law is two weeks.

As mentioned above, you have the right to 10 days (or 5 days in the case of a 3 day a week contract) of paid annual leave. The IEC employee Handbook even admits that these days of paid annual leave exist, but because the sentence is immediately followed with an explanation of IEC’s fixed annual leave system, you may have been misled into believing that those 10 (or 5 in the case of a 3 day a week contract) days of paid annual leave are somehow included in the school vacation fixed leave. They aren’t.

Even More Issues

There are legal questions as to whether IEC is even legally allowed to send teachers to work at Boards of Education especially in light of bulletins published by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and by the Tokyo Labor Bureau. The Tokyo Labor Bureau has already stated that they have no record of IEC being licensed to dispatch workers.

You’re a schoolteacher. Schoolteachers in our home countries all belong to a union. Protect and inform yourself by joining the union today.

info@nambufwc.org

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