On May 20, the General Union met RCS Corporation in collective bargaining regarding one of our members’ eligibility for shakai hoken.

The issue is as simple as it is shameful.

Our member should have been able to rely on the basic protections that social insurance is meant to provide during pregnancy, childbirth, and recovery. Instead, because of RCS Corporation’s handling of her shakai hoken status, she has been left without the maternity-related benefits that social insurance offers.

RCS Corporation had previously been an expanded-coverage workplace for shakai hoken. However, on April 14, the company applied for exemption from that status. The member’s new contract was set to begin the very next day, on April 15. As a result, the company now claims that she does not meet the requirements for enrollment and refuses to enroll her in shakai hoken.

The company insists that it is acting according to the law, but that is exactly the problem.

Labor laws are not a company’s highest standard of responsibility. They are the bare minimum. Many of these systems were built decades ago, in a very different society, with very different assumptions about work, family, and women’s participation in the workforce.

Today, more women are working. More women are balancing pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, and employment. A company that employs women cannot pretend that maternity protections are some unusual exception or inconvenience. They are part of the basic reality of the modern workplace.

If RCS Corporation believes that the letter of the law is the limit of what it can do for its workers, then it is not leading. It has barely reached the starting line.

A responsible company asks: What is fair? What is humane? What support does this worker need at one of the most physically and financially vulnerable moments of her life?

RCS Corporation’s answer was: we have no plan to change course.

We at General Union strongly condemn this response. We will continue to pursue this matter, continue to demand accountability, and continue to insist that workers deserve more than technical legal excuses when their livelihoods, health, and families are at stake.

RCS Corporation can do better.

We intend to make sure it does.