The Japan Airlines flight crew are presently divided into three unions, namely, Japan Airlines Captains Association (JCA with 1100 members), Japan Airlines Senior Flight Engineers Union (SEU with 150 members) and our Japan Airlines Flight Crew Union(1400 first officers and flight engineers).
This unwelcome situation has been brought about by the many years of company’s ferocious labor-management policy. Japan Airlines’ flight crew have been fighting the fierce battle against the tenacious attempts by the management to “divide and destroy” the unity of the flight crew and flight crew union.
All the captains and senior flight engineers are designated by the company as “managerial personnel”. Among the three unions, the members of the Captains Associations and Senior Flight Engineers Union have long been in a position where labor union activities were virtually impossible.
When any copilot upgrades to be a captain, the company designates him as a managerial crewmember on the basis of so-called “all the captains are managerial personnel” system. This has left no exception. Being in “managerial” position, the captains have limited access to democratic procedures of collective bargaining and industrial actions. They never had any work agreement. The only thing that governed was work rules unilaterally imposed by the management.
In 1993, the company unilaterally cancelled the written work agreements about flight/duty time limitations that had been well-established for the preceding 20 years.
We at Japan Airlines Flight Crew Union filed a lawsuit at Tokyo District Court with a purpose of restoring the former work agreement. (non-existence of obligation to work under the work rule unilaterally imposed by the company)
The court deliberations are still continuing.
The Japanese laws do not incorporate the idea of “sustained validity of an existing agreement after it is unilaterally cancelled by one party until such time as new agreement is reached between two parties concerned” which is common in countries abroad. With a lack of such legal protections, the members of Japan Airlines Flight Crew Union presently are left without any agreement with the company.
Under the company-imposed work rules, we are being forced to perform work with no contract at all. Some of the results include un-augmented minimum crew flight across the Pacific from San Francisco to Narita with up to twelve flight hours. It is outside the norm of world civil aviation, and far in excess of U.S. airline regulations. Flight safety is suffering.
Since 1993, the management has kept canceling virtually all the written agreements including wage agreements. The number of agreements that the company canceled has reached nearly forty.
The court deliberations on the cancelled work agreement is scheduled to be completed in July 1999 according to the time table presented by the presiding judge at the latest session on July 29. So, after five years of continued sessions, another year of final deliberation is ahead of us until the initial judgment is made.
We see many reasons for this undesirable situation. Firstly, the Japanese Labor Standard Law, which is supposed to set minimum standards for the working conditions, have quite a number of exemptions and exceptions. Secondly, the Japanese Labor Union Law has plenty of loopholes which the Japanese employers are thankfully taking advantage of. Furthermore, the climate of Japanese labor-management relations is such that the labor unions of most major companies (company unions) have few options but to act in the interest of the management. The idea of fighting for one’s own working condition through union activities does not seem very popular here. And this kind climate here seem to have produced unfavorable impacts on the court judgments in labor dispute cases in the past. The Japanese were once called “economic animals” (meaning “work addicts”). A Japanese word “karoushi” (literally meaning “death from excessive fatigue”) is said to be gaining popularity in English speaking countries. The reasons mentioned above might explain the background of these situations.
And above all, the Labor Management Department of our Company has been playing the most crucial role in creating the abnormal situation here. They have been very clever and skillful in taking advantage of the background we just described; the exemptions and exceptions in the Labor Standard Law, the loop holes in Labor Union Law, and the current Japanese climate or sentiment about labor union activities.
We do regret that Japan Airlines has a bitter history of many major accidents that have claimed a total of 731 lives to date. We saw in the background that the management was more interested in making money than safety of flight, and they kept themselves busy trying to undermine the bargaining power of labor unions by forcing them to separate into smaller units.
In June earlier this year, a new company President took office at JAL. The new President (Mr. Isao Kaneko) has continually actively operated in the field of labor management in the past twenty five years. He is the one of the crucial people who have long been pushing the Company’s apparent policy of “Divide and Conquer”. Mr. Kaneko was the General Manager in the Department of Labor Management, and he later assumed the position of the Director in charge of labor management. In those positions, he was responsible for projecting and executing their plans for canceling nearly forty written labor agreements including flight/duty time limitations and wage system agreements.
If we look at a brighter side of our situation, our three flight crew unions have gained closer cooperation in the past months through a variety of united activities. We have started to work together in many areas of common interest. This has been a noteworthy and very encouraging improvement as we look back into the past. Our participation in Alliance Coalition related activities are helping us greatly toward better unity. As we make steady democratic steps to protect our mutual interests, we will have more and more harmonized actions and movements which might culminate in the establishment of a single respectable flight crew union in the not too distant future.
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