WWIN news No.10 AUG.20.2002
～ Information from Japan～
We are sorry that WWIN couldn’t send you the News since last summer. We will send it by E-mail now. Sumitomo plaintiffs and the member of WWIN went to the UN & ILO at Geneva last year.
We presented our long report to the UN on last Aug. as follow .
We’ll send you WWIN’s next News No.(11) in several weeks. (by Shizuko Koedo)
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AUG.13.2001
To: The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
Working Women’s International Network
Working Women’s International Network (WWIN) is a grass roots group found in 1995. Its aim is to ensure the improvement of working women’s status, prohibit indirect discrimination and realise equal pay for work of equal value in Japan. Its membership is now about 800. WWIN’s main activities are to support the plaintiffs of Sumitomo Electric, Sumitomo Chemical and Sumitomo Metal litigations where the plaintiffs are asking to redress wage discrimination.
Japan ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in June 1979. In relation to the articles 2, 3, 6 and 7of ICESCR, we would like to give an account of Japanese women’s situation using the case of Sumitomo trials to show how persistent employment discrimination based on sex is found in some of the largest Japanese companies. We also would like to make some recommendations in this report.
Article 2, 2: Non-discrimination
The plaintiffs in the Sumitomo Electric, Sumitomo Chemical cases are asking to rectify employment discrimination against women
In 1995 nine women working in three manufacturing companies in the Sumitomo group (Sumitomo Electric, Sumitomo Chemical, Sumitomo Metal) filed a suit in the Osaka District Court for compensatory damages against the companies. They claimed that because they were women they had been subject to promotion and wage discrimination in a gender segregated employment control system.
The Sumitomo group is the one of the largest business conglomerates in Japan. However, its employment policy systematically discriminates against women. Women workers were appointed to perform only fixed and subsidiary roles in the companies. They have never been given any responsible work, even though some of these female workers have been employed for more than 20 years. They have asked their bosses for work worth doing many times. Women do not become managers although they have served for 20-30 years. Almost all their male counterparts with the same academic qualifications have become managers. Women only earn about half of men’s salary.
In 1985 Japan ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, in 1986 the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEO L) was introduced and in 1999 the revised Equal Employment Opportunity Law was implemented. However, even now large Japanese enterprises still maintain discriminatory employment systems, ones which restrict women’s opportunities in terms of assignment, promotion, salary, and every aspect of a company’s business.
The Japanese court dismissed all the plaintiffs’ claims in both the Electric case in July 2000 and the Chemical case in March 2001. One of the plaintiffs of the Electric case describes the details of the two cases below.
‘Five years since we had taken the companies to the court, our claims in both the Sumitomo Electric and Chemical cases were completely dismissed.
I started work at Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd. in 1969 after I graduated high school. Ever since I have been doing the same kind of clerical accounting work for 32 years. My five male colleagues, who also joined Sumitomo Electric as clerical workers in 1969, all managed to change their career stream into the managerial one five years after they started. And for the last ten years they have been further promoted into administrative posts. One of them was my line manager until recently.
By contrast, we women haven’t been given a chance to seek promotion and are still forced to be in the position of common clerks. In Japan, workers develop their capacities through on-the-job training. I have been asking for an opportunity to do different kinds of work to develop my capacities to a series of my line managers. I have been asking to do the work my male colleagues do. But I have been ignored.
One of the examples is the team meeting. In the team meeting, the members receive a brief on company’s policies and team strategies and discuss them. Despite making a number of their requests to attend, women are not allowed to sit in the team meeting, nor receive any necessary information to perform their duties. If the team member is a man, he can attend the meeting from the next day after he started to work. This reflects the way that the company regards women as secondary workforce. As a result, women workers only earn 60% of the men’s salary at Sumitomo Electronics and men earn US$2,000 more than women per month.
Before we filed a suit in the Osaka District Court, we had visited the Osaka Prefectural Women’s and Young Workers’ Office of the Labour Ministry to ask for assistance in settlement of disputes in 1994. This was based on the procedure in the old EEOL. However, the office rejected our claim by arguing, ‘There is no sex discrimination. The differences are based on the career courses male and female employees have been recruited and hired into different employment tracks’.
The old EEOL didn’t help us at all.
After this disappointment, we filed a suit against the companies and the Japanese government in the Osaka District Court asking to redress for employment discrimination against women. However, the decisions of the court in the Electric case was even more disappointing and wholly based on bias against women workers. The judge said:
“There were huge discrepancies between men and women. This is the result of the gender segregated employment control system which the company has been operating. And this is against the sprit of the Japanese Constitution. However, we cannot charge the company with having breached the law. Around the time, when the plaintiffs were appointed in 1969, gender role recognition was strongly rooted in general social norms in Japan, and women were not expected to work for a long period. Therefore the gender based appointment system was a reasonable policy for enterprises to have.”
The judges introduced the same kind of logic in the decisions of the Sumitomo Chemical case. When the plaintiffs asked their bosses to do the tasks men were doing, one of the bosses replied, ‘I don’t want you to be undertaking conspicuous, high profile work for the company; it is the place of women to work quietly in the background for the company’s benefit (while men are fighting at the front line)’. ‘Your job is to perform only fixed and subsidiary roles. You only need to do the jobs you are given’. ‘There were some occasions when bosses instructed other male employees to deliberately limit the role of women in the company. They made comments including, ‘Don’t let women undertake any tasks involving judgment’ or ‘ Don’t bring women outside into the public gaze’. These comments reflect that the company tries to stop women to develop their capacities, discourage them and encourage to leave the company as soon as possible. We managed to reveal that what has been really happening at the company during the trial. However, the judges rejected the plaintiffs’ claims by saying ‘If some of the bosses did make these comments, it was only a matter of individual bosses.’
We have been demanding for compensation for employment discrimination ever since we joined the company. As a supporting document, we submitted a statement written by Marsh Freeman, Director of IWRAW to the court. She said that the company’s liability should become effective in 1987 as soon as after Japan implemented the CEDAW and the EEOL. Therefore the company should already have taken some action to rectify the employment discrimination against women.
In the judgement the court stated, ‘the Convention and Law were not effective retroactively. Therefore the company has no liability for discrimination nor responsibility to redress discrimination from the past.’ However, the discrimination is still continuing. The judges failed to acknowledge the fact that Japan ratified ICESCR in June 1979 and CEDAW in June 1985. In this sense, the judges wrongly interpreted the non-retroactive principle in the Article 28 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Therefore we demand for compensation for discrimination ever since Japan implemented the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the EEOL.
Protesting against the judges who made the decision of the Sumitomo Electric and Chemical cases with full of gender bias, the Metal plaintiffs decided to take appeal for the judges to be replaced. WWIN supported this appeal by publishing protesting adverts and organising a human chain surrounding the Osaka district court.
In June 2001, WWIN invited an expert on education to eradicate gender bias in the judiciary in the USA. This helped us to learn American experiences in terms of eliminating gender bias in the judiciary.
Recommendations:
In relation to Article 3, Guaranteeing equal rights between women and men and Article 6, the right to work
It can be asked whether the EEOL brought equal rights between women and men.
The old EEOL prohibits obvious discrimination or says that employers have an obligation to make an effort towards the elimination of obvious forms of discrimination against women. The Minister’s guidelines promulgated under the old EEOL stipulate that employers should not exclude women because of being women in each recruitment and hiring stream (the type of job, the qualification, the type of employment). As a result, in order to evade the law, two different courses of appointment have been created. They are the managerial course and the clerical course. The logic behind of the different course system is that once the course is different, it can be claimed that discrepancies are not from sex discrimination rather from the two different career steams. The system has been contributing to conceal indirect sex discrimination in the Japanese labour market.
In 1960s, a lot of private companies in Japan took up this gender based hiring system. After the old EEOL was introduced, most of these companies automatically assigned male employees to the managerial path and female employees to the clerical path. At some companies female employees who wished to go to the managerial stream had to take a harsh exam in addition to securing a recommendation from their bosses.
While most women have to be in the clerical path, the old EEOL which prohibits discrimination in promotion, training and assignment does not help women to have equal treatment with men, who are able to enter the managerial path.
Female employees at Sumitomo Electric requested the Prefectual Women’s and Young Workers’ Office to mediate in the disputes over discrimination in promotion in 1994. However, the office refused to initiate the mediation by arguing:
Male comparators are appointed to a head-office based career course, which is a different appointment course from women. Differences arising from different recruitment and hiring structures of the employment control system are allowed under the EEOL.
In other words, the discriminatory gender based appointment system still continues at Sumitomo Electric simply by changing the name of male and female jobs to the managerial and clerical careers system.
There is some evidence on sex discrimination in hiring. Table 1 shows that the number of new female graduates who started to work in the managerial course in Japanese major trading companies. The average proportion of female graduates in the managerial course in the 10 years after the EEOL was introduced, was about 1% of the whole employees in the course. This figure has not changed very much even after the EEOL was revised. Table 2 and 3 also clearly show how women employees are underrepresented in the managerial career stream in the three Sumitomo companies where the plaintiffs have been suffering from discrimination for many years. The two tables indicate that the number of women in the managerial track are so low that the companies see them as nearly tokenistic, and are not seriously promoting women in managerial roles.
In the new Labour Minister’s guideline promulgated under the revised EEOL, the measures breaching Article 5 of EEOL should be examined according to each division of the recruitment and hiring system, i.e. the type of job, the qualification, the type of employment, the form of work and other division of workers. The guideline also stipulates that the measures breaching Article 6 (discrimination in assignment, promotion and training) of EEOL should be examined by each division of the employment control system. The guideline states that once the career course is different, then the exclusion of women is not based on sex but is rather based on the two different career steams under the revised EEOL. This is why we call the two employment tracks system indirect discrimination.
As described above, under the both old and new guidelines, once the type of job, the qualification, the type of employment or the form of work is different, it does not mean to exclude women because of being women. Therefore as long as such guidelines exist, it is impossible to question any kind of sex discrimination at the workplace under the revised EEOL. In addition, these terms in the EEOL and the guidelines fail to comply with obligations under ICESCR as well as under CEDAW.
Reference:
Table 1, The number of managerial positions based on Gender under the two track hiring system (Major Trading companies)
Table 2, Men and women in the managerial track in the three Sumitomo companies
Table 3, The number of newly-employed in the managerial 1997.
Recommendations:
In relation to article 7, The condition of work/ Equal pay for work of equal value
The report written by the Japanese government claimed that in principle, wages were determined through discussions between labour and management or through collective negotiations. It also claimed that Japan has been improving status of women workers since it ratified the ILO Convention No.100 in July 1967. However, the government report gives no concrete figures of improved wage discrepancies between women and men as a proof, nor provides any clear policies to realise equal remuneration for men and women workers for work of equal value although Japan has ratified the ILO Convention No.100 and ICESCR.
The study on wage discrepancies between women and men conducted by the Association of Women Working for Trading Companies, highlights the completely different picture from what the Japanese government claims ‘steady progress’.
Table 4 shows wage comparisons between women and men from 1983, before the EEOL introduced, to 2001 at a general trading company. In this table wages of male employees in the managerial stream count as 100. One can then compare the wages of female employees in the clerical stream. At the age of 25, women in the clerical stream earn 80% of the rate of male employees in the managerial stream. At the age of 35, women get 55% and at the age of 45, women get 52%. The table also shows that a 45 years old female employee who has been working for 22 years in the clerical stream earns the same amount of salary as a 26 years old male employee who has been working for 3 years in the managerial stream.
In order to redress this huge amount of wage discrepancies, the Association of Women Working for Trading Companies, together with some academics studied pay equity (equal pay for work of equal value) at a general trading company. One of the findings is that although women and men are in the different career streams, their duties overlap with each other. For example, even the sales department, where the company claims that men in the managerial stream are playing the crucial role in the company such as drawing up contracts and sales promotional activities and women in the clerical stream undertake subsidiary tasks, women are in fact conducting 88% of the value of the men’s work. [Study group on Pay Equity, (1997) Work analysis and Pay Equity at a trading company].
References:
Table 4: Annual Income Comparison between Male & Female 1983-2001 (A trading company)
Recommendations:
To: Dear Madam Chairperson Virginia B.Dandan
Cc: Dear Committee Members on ESCR
Cc: Dear Ms Constance Thomas
The day before yesterday’s committee meeting for examining the Japanese government’s
report was very interesting. Especially I much agree with the questions and comments on necessity for educating Japanese judiciary professionals. Although I think that it may be too late, I would send you the last page of the counter report submitted by the WWIN once again by attached sheet.
This is very important thing both of CESCR and ILO also us. The Japanese Supreme court mentioned that there was no exactlyl aw in Japan which ensures
equal pay orequal work . Recently WWIN obtained its statements. I will appreciate it if you use them in the committee’s comments toward the Japanese government.
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Re: Additional recommendations to the Japanese Government by the Working Women International Network
The Japanese Supreme Court recently revealed a document entitled ‘The Summary of the Discussions in the Council of Judges on Civil/Administrative Labour Cases.’ The document says that ‘There is no existing domestic law, which stipulates the principle of equal pay for work of equal value’. The statement is very problematic. Therefore we draw additional recommendations to the Japanese Government in addition to our original counter report.
Recommendations:
WWIN：
E-mail: wwin@my.email.ne.jp
URL: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/wwn/wwin/