Japan’s Laid-Off Managers Employ an Un-Japanese Tactic: Confrontation
TOKYO
In a nation where quiet, patient suffering is raised to the level of a fine art, 58-year-old Kiyotsugu Shitara is preaching revolt. His 5-year-old Tokyo Manager’s Union urges Japan’s downtrodden “salarymen” to stand up and fight.
Downtrodden? Middle-aged white-collar workers who average $50,000 a year to sit in cozy offices without any heavy lifting? The way Shitara sees it, this group at the heart of Japan Inc. is among the least represented, most alienated in Japanese society.
And increasingly today, after giving up their youth, family life, hobbies, vacations and independence for the almighty corporation, these employees are ending up on the street as Japan’s economy stagnates.
The Tokyo Manager’s Union has grown in five years to include 1,100 members and several affiliates. It’s also spurred other, more traditional unions to start representing unemployed managers.
The union, the first in Japan to specifically represent these unemployed, operates out of cramped offices in northern Tokyo, up four flights in a sliver of an elevator. The long, narrow room is packed with bullhorns, boxes of pamphlets, books, flags from past campaigns and low-end furniture resting on a fluorescent-green carpet that looks as if it belongs on a miniature golf course.
In a society where most people shun confrontation, meet the company’s every whim and quit without a fuss when pressured, Shitara is attracting converts with his decidedly un-Japanese line: individual empowerment.
The union has been profiled on numerous television shows and in newspaper and magazine articles. Membership has expanded as the economy has deteriorated.
Companies must be made to pay for laying off their white-collar workers, he believes, or face hard-nosed negotiations, embarrassing media attention and damaged relations with customers and suppliers.
A longtime labor activist, Shitara seized on the idea for a managers union in 1993 when Pioneer Electronics laid off 32 mid-level managers. Although thousands more would follow in the next six years, this was a rude awakening for Japan, “really shocking,” Shitara says.
In a flash, he decided that mid-level salarymen facing layoffs, who were represented neither by management nor labor unions, needed a voice. “I decided we needed to create a union that people could join regardless of their employment situation,” Shitara says.
Under Japanese law, a company can’t be made to negotiate with a disgruntled worker, only with a union. Lawsuits can take a decade to resolve. Shitara uses this system to his advantage, however, by granting instant membership to newly unemployed managers and then helping them fight the layoffs case by case. The union currently has 120 cases pending with almost the same number of companies and has reached 400 settlements with companies over the last five years.
Before their layoffs, members typically enjoyed a secure, five-decade ride from nursery school to middle management, with every major life decision planned by parent, teacher or boss. For many, their job was their identity.
“Most people here have been incredibly loyal to their companies,” Shitara says. “But once they get laid off, they start thinking about who they really are.”
Losing one’s innocence at age 55 can be a jolt. So, even before negotiations begin with their companies, new union members are put to work counseling other newly laid-off managers, answering hotlines and sitting in on negotiations.
“Until this whole thing happened, I was on the side that fired people. This is the first time I was fired,” said Moroya Hiroyuki, who is fighting his layoff by a subsidiary of telecom giant KDD.
“Before that, I was a little cocky and big-headed and believed as long as you had talent, you could make it,” Hiroyuki adds. “Now I realize how important it is for people to help each other. It’s been the biggest lesson of my life.”
The union’s main leverage is publicity: the threat of demonstrations, deft use of the media and subtle or not-so-subtle threats of damaging public attention against the target company.
“My company was of course surprised I was fighting so much,” says Akio Misuda, 51, a former member of the union and now a management consultant. “Because Shitara is such a good arguer, the company got scared that if they fired me, there would be protesting in front of the company, passing out leaflets, bad publicity.”
Many of the tactics that work well in Japan--where companies go to great lengths to avoid embarrassment--wouldn’t work well against battle-hardened American or European companies, Shitara acknowledges.
One effective tactic in Japan, for instance, is to threaten to contact major customers, suppliers or business partners of the target company. This often leads Japanese companies to settle quickly, in a nation where shame remains a guiding social force.
As might be expected given Japan’s preference for group harmony, many find Shitara out of bounds.
Yuji Genda, an economics professor at Gakushuin University, believes the union’s tactics fall into the dirty-tricks category. “I suspect they are using blackmail,” he says. “I don’t like it.” Genda adds that it’s not clear where the group’s funding comes from and says the group is too politically motivated.
Shitara seems comfortable with controversy, however, and deftly sidesteps the blackmail charges.
“I avoid anything that violates the criminal law,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “We are very careful about the way we word our fliers and convey our message.” The union says it is funded by membership dues of about $35 a month, and it occasionally gets a small percentage if it negotiates a windfall settlement.
The union has support where it needs it, Shitara adds, namely with the Japanese at large.
“Public opinion supports our work,” he says, “even though legal experts and scholars don’t like me.”
Etsuko Kawase in The Times’ Tokyo bureau contributed to this report.
