When Japan's Unions All Ask for a Raise at Once — Epoche B1
NOTICE: The Spring Wage Round (Shuntō) — Questions and Answers Issued: 3 February, Sakura Denki Workers' Union, Branch Office (Building 2, ground floor) The union submitted this year's wage demand to the company on 1 February. Below are the questions members asked most often at the January meeting. Q1: Why negotiate every spring, at the same time as every other union? Because the timing is the strategy. Since 1955, Japanese unions have run their wage talks together each spring — the shuntō, or “spring offensive”. A single company union bargaining alone is small against its firm, and a firm that raises pay alone fears losing out to rivals. When every union asks at once, no company is at a special disadvantage, and every settlement can be compared with the others. Q2: What happens in March? The largest manufacturers — cars, electronics, steel — deliver their answers on a single day in mid-March, the concentrated reply day. The figures are on the evening news the same night, and they become the going rate: smaller firms, and workplaces with no union at all, settle in the following weeks with those numbers on the table. The company here has said it will answer in late March. Q3: The demand says “base-up”. What is that? Two different things rise in spring. The regular annual step (teiki shōkyū) moves each person up the existing pay scale and happens even in a bad year. A base-up lifts the whole scale itself, for everyone at once. Only the base-up is a true raise. This year's branch demand: a base-up of 10,500 yen per month. Q4: What should members do? Attend the report meeting, 18 March, 6 p.m., second-floor hall. Questions before then: extension 118. References Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (2005). Industrial Safety and Health Act. Japan.