G. communication Co. has sold all of its shares in a unit that manages English language schools Nova and Geos, officials of the Japanese diversified business group said Monday.
The shares in G. education Co. were sold on Friday to an investment company headed by G. communication founder Masaki Inayoshi for an undisclosed sum.
Open Letter to Kevin Salthouse
Kevin Salthouse,
I am glad to hear that the new Interac is “financially stable”. With this financial stability, I can think of no better way to move from “strength to strength” than by improving the working conditions of all of your ALTs. Here are a few suggestions that I personally think would benefit all ALTs:
Kevin Salthouse’s Response to Rumors
To: All instructors
From: Kevin Salthouse, General Manager, Human Resources and Class Management
Division
Subject: Response to rumors concerning the financial stability of Interac.
Date: September 26, 2010
Earlier this month, I wrote a message in the ‘Interac-shin’ newsletter announcing that the Selnate Group was re-organizing into a new group under the Interac name. This change will be effective October 1, 2010.
Unfortunately, comments have been made on the forums of some well-known websites this weekend suggesting that Interac may be in financial difficulty or be going bankrupt. I am deeply concerned that such rumors may cause you worry and stress. So, let me categorically state that Interac is financially stable and in absolutely NO danger of going bankrupt. I would like to put an end to such rumors here and now. Nor will the re-organization have any impact on your jobs or working conditions.
Tokyo gov’t employed worker over 20 years on temp contracts without benefits
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government employed a woman as a librarian for over 20 years through repeated renewals of short-term contracts, meaning the woman has not received commuter expenses or other allowances, or been entered into government employee medical insurance, it has been learned.
“We cannot determine if there is a city-employed worker who worked for 20 years on short-term contracts, but even if there is, it does not violate the law,” said a city spokesperson. However, legal experts are criticizing the metropolitan government, saying that this method of employment ignores many labor laws.
The Tokyo government’s rules on short-term employment stipulate that “a single contract will be for two months, and in the event the employee’s contract must be renewed, the continuous period of employment can not exceed six months.” To abide by these rules, the woman has been employed on two-month contracts, and in recent years she has been working for five-month stretches followed by one-month breaks before being hired again.
At least one bureau of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government employs around 600 employees on short-term contracts. It is possible there are other employees on short-time contracts effectively working as long-term employees.
One lawyer knowledgeable on labor issues says, “It is a serious problem having someone working continuously, which cannot be called ‘short-term,’ and leaving them without the protection and stability of social insurance for 20 years.”
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100929p2a00m0na013000c.html
Tokyo Landlords Lose Century-Old ‘Gift Money’ as Rents Slump
After viewing almost 100 Tokyo apartments, banker Damien Cambon was happy to discover that a Japanese tradition dating back more than a century is dying: the payment of up to two months’ rent extra as a gift to the landlord.
“Reikin,” or “gift money,” a non-refundable fee on top of a deposit and any broker fees that has helped boost landlords’ earnings since at least 1897, is the latest victim of a slump in the market in the world’s second-most expensive city. Rents in Tokyo’s five central wards fell to an average 4,165 yen per square meter in June, the lowest since the Japan Real Estate Institute started tracking prices in 1998.
“My broker would say, ‘forget about the gift money,’ and the landlords would all say, ‘OK,’” said Cambon, 29, who works for a U.S.-based bank he declined to name. “This was a very good surprise.”
As Prime Minister Naoto Kan considers injecting as much as 4.6 trillion yen ($55 billion) into the economy to create jobs, boost consumption and stem 12 years of deflation, Tokyo landlords are also trying to stimulate the rental market by scrapping reikin and waiving as much as five months’ rent for new leases.
“The rental property business is changing,” said Yoshiya Watanabe, a real estate agent at Atland co. in Tokyo. “If you eliminate reikin, you get better turnaround” for vacant units.
While landlords of luxury Tokyo apartments rented for 500,000 yen or more have waived reikin in the past, as many as 65 percent of units below that tier now don’t require gift money, compared with about 25 percent two years ago, Watanabe said.
Rooftop, Terrace
Cambon said his previous landlord lowered his rent 13 percent at the end of his two-year lease and waived the contract renewal fee of one-month rent. Even so, he opted for a new apartment with a terrace and rooftop access.
The September 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the recession that followed prompted a drop in occupancy rates, said Hirotaka Uruma, chief financial officer at Daiwa House Morimoto Asset Management Co. The company oversees BLife Investment Corp., a residential real-estate investment trust that manages 8,116 apartments in Tokyo.
“Waiving reikin has become the norm,” he said. “When your competitors are also waiving it, it doesn’t make sense for us to keep demanding it.”
BLife’s residential occupancy rates in Tokyo’s five central wards dropped to 85 percent in November from 94 percent a year earlier, he said. In the same period, gift-money income as a proportion of total revenue for BLife dropped to 0.3 percent from 1.65 percent, Uruma said.
‘Doesn’t Make Sense’
“In the long run, reikin will completely disappear because this is a system that doesn’t make sense,” said Yoji Otani, a real estate analyst at Deutsche Bank AG in Tokyo. Eliminating the fee “will make it easier for tenants to move around, which is good for brokerage companies, but bad for residential REITs.”
Gift money dates back to as early as 1897 when it was documented in a contract for a property in Tokyo’s Chiyoda ward, according to “Japan’s Rental Property (1995),” a book by Nobuhisa Segawa, a law professor at Hokkaido University. The practice originated to offset rising land prices while ensuring rents for new tenants weren’t substantially different from what their neighbors were paying, according to Segawa. Reikin income is typically split between the broker and owner.
Landlords who are holding on to the practice, also known as “key money,” include those who have inherited their property and are less concerned about vacancy, Watanabe said.
Not in New York
Demanding key money is illegal in New York, according to the New York City Rent Guidelines Board. The practice is no longer prohibited in England, though landlords typically don’t charge a “premium,” which gives tenants the right to assign tenancy to a third party, according to Tessa Shepperson, a lawyer in Norwich.
Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara said in a 2004 policy statement that reikin as well as contract renewal fees should be eliminated. While the city’s position has not changed, it can’t legally force landlords to abolish the fee, said Kazuo Onoda, who works on the city’s efforts to improve housing policies. The decline of reikin “is a result of market forces,” he said.
Even after Japan’s land prices tumbled the most in 13 years in 2009, Tokyo is still the second-most expensive city in the world for expatriates behind Luanda, Angola, based on Mercer LLC’s Cost of Living Survey released in June that compares housing, food, gasoline, movie and other prices. Rent for a mid- range two-bedroom unfurnished apartment in Japan’s capital averaged $4,436 a month, compared with $3,906 in London and $4,000 in New York, according to the study.
Reikin’s Return?
Some landlords say reikin payments may return once Japan’s property market recovers.
“At the moment, new supply is very limited,” said Atsushi Ogata, chief executive officer of Nomura Real Estate Asset Management Co. which manages a residential and an office REIT. “In a couple of years, we may face another good market, with demand outpacing supply, in which case we can probably charge as much reikin as before.”
Total gift-money income dropped by about half on average in March and April, when the majority of new tenants move in, from a year earlier, Ogata said.
Meanwhile, it’s a tenants’ market in Tokyo, as rent has dropped by as much as 15 percent since 2007, said Mikihisa Hirai, president of Tokyo-based Atlas Partners Japan Ltd., which owns more than 2,000 apartments in Nagoya, Osaka and Tokyo.
“In order to attract new tenants, owners would rather forget the gift money, especially when properties are owned by funds,” he said. “Investors can no longer count on reikin.”
Changes in October
For those of you that did not get the memo, Interac is about to go through some big changes. I have heard two very different announcements on the subject. From Kevin Salthouse, we all have this PDF file stating that Interac will be going through a “new phase of operations” and that this is just a “reorganization”. The General Union in Osaka however, has uncovered more details that point towards a new aquisition and a buyout by Advantage Partners, a company that describes its own business model as “Direct private equity investment via start-up and acquisition”.
It appears that Interac as we know it may be completely taken over and dissolved, although we may not know for sure until October first. Interac recently lost its right to do business with Osaka prefecture BoEs when it was found guilty of an Unfair Labor Practice against the General Union and of interfering in union business. Our members that have sued Interac have also won several court cases, meaning even more financial punishment.
When I originally heard of the name change and the association with bankruptcy, I was a bit skeptical. I thought Interac may have been changing names to avoid paying the damages to union members and as a way to get around the recent ruling that prevents them from doing business in Osaka prefectural BoEs. This certainly would not have been out of character for them; they have for years had a second name, Maxceed, that they used to double-bid BoEs across the nation. They would submit one bid as Interac, and one bid as Maxceed, and shuffle their ALTs between Maxceed/Interac contracts as needed. I was hired as an ALT for Interac in 2005, and was placed in a city where I was expected to lie to the BoE and tell them that my company was called “Maxceed”. The contract between the BoE and the dispatch company said “Maxceed”. My contract with the people in the same office, with the same employees with a different phone number said “Interac”. Also, in the past year, ALTs have complained to us that their time is split between “Maxceed” and “Interac” so that Interac can pretend that the ALT has two part time jobs, instead of a full time job and have an excuse to avoid giving the ALT full time benefits. If Interac is going to be dissolved, these kinds of practices never favored the ALT’s working conditions, and they will not be missed.
Whether Interac will be going fully under or whether things will really just be “reorganized”, my personal concern, shared among my fellow union members, is centered on the stability of employment for the foreign teachers in Japan. I am urging every ALT in Interac/Maxceed/every-other-dispatch-company-in-Japan to band together, unionize and fight back to improve working conditions for yourselves and for the people who will want to come to Japan and teach here in the future. Demand to be directly hired! Every Interac/Maxceed contract I have ever seen has either been
1) illegal according to the The Ministry of Education guidelines concerning proper dispatch methods or
2) has enough clauses in it that violate Labor Standards/Trade Union Law that the whole thing is null and void.
If you unionize and claim your right to be directly hired, the BoEs will not be able to ignore you. I have seen it myself; the when I was in Osaka and a member of the General Union, we forced my BoE to direct hire, and the ALTs there are in a much better position today than they were in 2005.
If you are tired of the instability of your job, of getting reduced or no pay for March or August, of getting penalized for being sick, then you should force the BoE to take responsibility. Unionize, and demand direct employment and the full benefits that you are entitled to under the law.
In Solidarity,
Erich Manning
http://interacunion.org/
https://tozenunion.org/
http://interac.generalunion.org/
http://fukuoka.generalunion.org/
Caregivers sent to Japan under EPA get hand to overcome language hurdle
The Philippine government has begun language classes to help nurses wanting to go and work in Japan overcome the high language barrier, and even pays them to enroll.
The project is aimed at boosting the rate of Philippine applicants who pass Japan’s national nursing examination and increasing the number of nurses seeking a career in Japan under the economic partnership agreement (EPA) between the two countries.
During one recent Japanese class, a teacher held up a panel with kanji for difficult words, such as “roasha” [聾唖者] (the hearing impaired) and “nenza” [捻挫] (sprain), while the students read the words aloud in unison.
In February, 59 Philippine nurses made their first attempt at Japan’s national nursing exams; only one passed. If nurses on the EPA program fail to pass the exam for three straight years, they must return home.
Questions have been raised over the current EPA arrangement, which offers foreign nurses only six months of Japanese language lessons.
The EPA between Japan and the Philippines took effect in December 2008. In May last year, the Philippines began dispatching nurses and caregivers to Japan. Under the EPA deal, Japan accepts up to 1,000 such nurses and caregivers for two years, but only 436 have been sent so far.
In Japan, the high cost of getting foreign nurses up to speed because of the language hurdle has deterred some potential employers from hiring them. The EPA will be reviewed next year, and Tokyo likely will seek to tweak the current system.
Viveca Catalig, a deputy administrator at the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, acknowledged his country’s own effort has its limits, and said he hopes Japan will consider expanding its language training and easing requirements for nurses in order not to disappoint motivated Philippine applicants.
Factory, employment agency in Japan must pay for exploiting interns
Officially, they came to Japan for training, but in reality, they were forced to work long hours for little pay.
A Japanese court on Monday ordered a sewing company and an employment service to pay 4.4 million yen (52,250 dollars) in damages, ruling that the firms had exploited four Chinese interns.
The High Court in the south-western city of Fukuoka thereby confirmed a lower court ruling and also ordered the factory in Amakusa to pay an additional 12.8 million yen in unpaid wages.
The four interns went to work at the factory in 2006, and for a year, they were forced to work from 8:30 am to as late as 3 am the next morning. They had two or three days off each month.
The case put a spotlight on conditions for foreign interns in Japan and could lead to improvements in their working conditions.
The three-year training programme that the plaintiffs were involved in was introduced 20 years ago as a way to help workers from developing countries develop their skills in Japan and take them back to their home countries, but critics said many of the interns are unskilled labourers who are forced to work for low pay.
Many of their employers are struggling small firms who find few Japanese willing to work for the wages they offer. For them, the internship programme was a welcome one, allowing them to lower their wage costs.
But the programme has also had deadly consequences for workers. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper said that in the 2008-09 fiscal year, which ended March 31, 2009, 34 foreign interns died, 16 from heart attacks or strokes, an occurrence that critics said was the result of overwork.
As a result, a minimum wage for foreign interns was introduced in July and employers warned about exploiting such workers, but critics complained that the structure of the programme remained unchanged. The interns are protected by labour laws but many are still unfairly treated, they said.
Japan is seeing a demographic change at the moment. Its ageing, shrinking population has resulted in a shortage of workers in many areas. Immigration as a solution remains a taboo in Japan.
Japan, give us a break!
Time after time I’ve been in offices here where people feel under pressure not to take time off, for lunches or anything else.
According to a report by Harris Interactive this year, Japanese workers took off an average of 9.3 of their 16.6 legally mandated vacation days.
As anyone who works here knows, even that remarkable statistic hides a lot of pain. Most office workers contribute dozens of hours per month in unpaid overtime. Many don’t get proper dinner breaks and toil away into the evening. More than once I’ve seen friends arrive at 9 p.m. and congratulate themselves on getting home early.
Is it because everyone is so busy they can’t afford time off? Of course not — productivity in Japanese offices is low. Most people could easily do the work they’re assigned in half the time.
The really distressing thing is that bosses don’t even have to demand this masochistic behavior from employees here — workers police themselves.
Reformers in Britain and elsewhere discovered over a century ago that happy employees are motivated, productive employees.
Economists say one of Japan’s biggest structural problems is chronic underconsumption, in part because millions of workers have so little opportunity to spend their hard-earned cash.
And one more thing: Giving reasonable working hours to men and women would give them more time to meet, fall in love and rescue Japan from its marriage and fertility crisis.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/perspectives/news/20100916p2a00m0na004000c.html
小学校英語どうなる：打ち合わせは「偽装請負」？ 指導助手活用できず 業務委託、派遣で問題
目の前にＡＬＴ（外国語指導助手）がいても、教諭は授業の打ち合わせができない。授業中の指示も禁止。すべてＡＬＴを派遣している請負業者とファクスなどを使ったやりとりでしか伝えられない－－。