Emergency Meeting for NOVA members and other instructors/staff – Friday, 24 April at 10:00 and 22:00

Collective bargaining on Wednesday yielded very little. Usually collective bargaining does not deliver much the first time, but since we are racing the clock, we do not have time to spend weeks talking and must prepare for some activity on our part that will move the company to reason. So, we believe it is time to take a strike vote. This is rather fast, but the situation is urgent. At the meetings on Friday, we will discuss the situation and what a strike means in Japan and then ballot members to decide.

Some information about strikes:

• It requires no prior notice (meaning the strike notice is delivered at the time of the strike).
• There is no amount of minimum or maximum time. It can be from 1 minute to 1 year.
• There are no kinds of forced arbitration that must be entered into before striking.

With a concerted effort by you, we might be able to break NOVA’s stubborn streak and win our demands over the coronavirus.

This choice is up to NOVA workers and it will affect not only the current relationship with the company but the future too.

Therefore, we urge you to attend the meeting, listen, and ask questions.

Below is a brief synopsis of collective bargaining held on 22 April.

They state that they are taking steps to protect your safety in the workplace, but still insist on moving teachers to online centres, force teachers to travel on trains, and disregard the concerns of instructors and staff.

There were two small concessions made that the union must report. One, they have stopped collecting fines on 19 April (while one member was aware of this, no one else was and one member was fined yesterday for not attending). Also, they agreed to look at instructor’s individual situations (i.e. health, distance) and that the union could provide a list (when asked what kind of individual solutions they could provide, they couldn’t answer). Basically, these small things come out of their panic as opposed to being concrete concessions you can count on. Now it’s up to you to decide whether this in and of itself; whether these vague promises, are sufficient to satisfy you.

Please rsvp your attendance and feel free to share this with others. If you have not yet applied to join the union, you can do so at https://generalunion.org/join/