TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
August 16, 2013
Layoffs Taboo, Japanese Workers Head to Boredom Room
By HIROKO TABUCHI
TAGAJO, Japan — Shusaku Tani is employed at the Sony plant here, but he doesn’t really work.
For more than two years, he has come to a small room, taken a seat and then passed the time reading newspapers, browsing the Web and poring over engineering textbooks from his college days. He files a report on his activities at the end of each day.
Sony, Mr. Tani’s employer of 32 years, consigned him to this room because they can’t get rid of him. Sony had eliminated his position at the Sony Sendai Technology Center, which in better times produced magnetic tapes for videos and cassettes. But Mr. Tani, 51, refused to take an early retirement offer from Sony in late 2010 — his prerogative under Japanese labor law.
So there he sits in what is called the “chasing-out room.” He spends his days there, with about 40 other holdouts.
“I won’t leave,” Mr. Tani said. “Companies aren’t supposed to act this way. It’s inhumane.”
The standoff between workers and management at the Sendai factory underscores an intensifying battle over hiring and firing practices in Japan, where lifetime employment has long been the norm and where large-scale layoffs remain a social taboo, at least at Japan’s largest corporations.
Sony wants to change that, and so does Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. As Japan’s economic recovery sputters, reducing the restraints on companies has become even more important to Mr. Abe’s economic plans. He wants to loosen rigid rules on job terminations for full-time staff.
Economists say bringing flexibility to the labor market in Japan would help struggling companies streamline bloated work forces to better compete in the global economy. Fewer restrictions on layoffs could make it easier for Sony to leave loss-ridden traditional businesses and concentrate resources on more innovative, promising ones.
“I have a single wish for Japan’s electronics sector, and that’s labor reform,” said Atul Goyal, a technology analyst at Jefferies & Company.
Sony said it was not doing anything wrong in placing employees in what it calls Career Design Rooms. Employees are given counseling to find new jobs in the Sony group, or at another company, it said. Sony also said that it offered workers early retirement packages that are generous by American standards: in 2010, it promised severance payments equivalent to as much as 54 months of pay. But the real point of the rooms is to make employees feel forgotten and worthless — and eventually so bored and shamed that they just quit.
Labor practices in Japan contrast sharply with those in the United States, where companies are quick to lay off workers when demand slows or a product becomes obsolete. It is cruel to the worker, but it usually gives the overall economy agility. Some economists attribute the lack of a dynamic economy in Western Europe to labor laws similar to Japan’s that restrict layoffs.
New York had “rubber rooms” where it put teachers who would sit — with full pay — while the city tried to fire them. The practice was ended in 2010. The United Auto Workers and automakers had created, under union contracts, places where idled workers were essentially warehoused.
Sony, a sprawling company with more than 146,000 employees, is under pressure. It has been outmaneuvered by more nimble competitors and its executives are trying to remake the company. Fixing Sony is especially critical after it snubbed the American activist investor Daniel S. Loeb’s push to spin off part of Sony’s entertainment business. Its shares have fallen almost 10 percent since Sony rejected his proposal last week.
Critics of labor changes say something more important is at stake. They warn that making it easier to cut jobs would destroy Japan’s social fabric for the sake of corporate profits, causing mass unemployment and worsening income disparities. For a country that has long prided itself on stability and relatively equitable incomes, such a change would be unacceptable.
“That’s not the kind of country Japan should aim to be,” said Takaaki Matsuda, who leads the Sendai chapter of Sony’s union.
It would be a radical change. A combination of lifetime employment, seniority-based pay and intense worker loyalty to the company was credited for Japan’s postwar economic miracle, as stability and growth went hand in hand. But when the Japanese economy stumbled in the early 1990s, companies found that Japan’s rigid labor practices made downsizing impractical. Instead, unneeded workers were left with little to do besides gaze out of the window, giving rise to the term “madogiwa zoku” or the “window seat tribe.”
Proponents of employment change point out that stiff protections for workers have prompted companies to make major cuts in hiring, shrinking opportunities for scores of younger Japanese. Sony hired 160 fresh college graduates this fiscal year, compared with about 1,000 in 1991.
Companies have also adjusted by using a secondary class of temporary or part-time workers they can more easily let go. “In reality, hidden inequalities already exist in Japan,” said Fumio Ohtake an economist at Osaka University.
Still, some fear that Mr. Abe’s changes are not so much pro-market as just pro-business. A weaker yen has brought exporters like Sony windfall profits, yet no substantial increases in salary have followed, and many manufacturers continue to shift production overseas.
The delicacy of labor changes has forced Mr. Abe to tread gingerly. He took the issue off the agenda when he focused on parliamentary elections in July. After a big win for his party, it is back. But the new plan would ease firing rules only in Japan’s three biggest cities.
Japan’s biggest companies appear to be imitating Sony. Local media reports say many of them, including Panasonic, NEC and Toshiba, use the oidashibeya, or chase-out rooms, and similar tactics. In May, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported that an employee at a Panasonic unit was being required to spend his days in a room staring at monitors to catch irregularities. Last year, a Tokyo court ordered Benesse, an educational services company, to reinstate a worker who claimed she had been required to do demeaning, menial tasks after resisting pressure to leave.
Panasonic could not be reached for comment over its summer holiday period. Benesse did not respond to written requests for comment.
While details to the government plans are still being determined, Mr. Tani’s managers at Sony are already upping the ante. Starting this month, the company has ordered him to work 12-hour shifts on an assembly line at a Sony plant in Toyosato, more than an hour’s drive away. He says he will comply.
For Miwako Sato, who joined Sony right out of high school in 1974, the changes are a betrayal of an accepted social contract in Japan. She put in 12-hour shifts at the Sendai factory, working with huge rolls of magnetic film, and watched Sony grow into a global electronics powerhouse.
But technology moved on, and Sony was increasingly usurped by nimbler rivals. In 2003, the factory offered the first of many early retirement programs.
Two years ago, a destructive tsunami swept through the factory, sending workers scrambling to the roof. The damage prompted Sony to move its battery and optical devices operations, and the company later sold its chemical products business, eliminating more jobs at the plant.
In February, just two years shy of Mrs. Sato’s retirement, a manager had blunt news: “Your job no longer exists.” She refused to quit, and was dispatched to the chase-out room. There she completed an online degree in nursing the elderly. But she didn’t quit. Since last month, she has been assigned to do data entry.
Sony’s labor union estimates that the plant’s work force is half the size it was three years ago.
Mrs. Sato said that in the factory’s heyday, workers called Sony the Sony Maru, or the Sony Ship. “Everybody was on board, our fates tied together,” she said. “Not anymore.”
Joshua Hunt contributed research from Tokyo.
August 16, 2013
Blood and Chaos Prevail in Egypt, Testing Control
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — Egypt erupted into violent chaos on Friday, raising doubts about the new authorities’ capacity to maintain order, as Islamists and other opponents of last month’s military takeover fought security forces and their civilian allies in street battles across the capital and other cities.
The country seemed to descend into anarchy. Terrified protesters caught in a cross-fire jumped or fell from an overpass in a panicked effort to escape. A gunfight erupted on the doorstep of a Four Seasons hotel. Men wielding guns and machetes — some backing the Islamists, others police supporters in civilian clothes, others simply criminals — roamed the streets of the capital and other cities, and it was often impossible to tell friend from foe.
News reports put the civilian death toll for Friday at well over 100, which would bring the total since Wednesday to nearly 750. Health Ministry officials said Friday’s civilian toll was 27, but late Friday afternoon more than 30 uncounted corpses were seen at a field hospital in a mosque near the center of the fighting, in Cairo’s Ramses Square.
Defying a 7 p.m. curfew, antagonists battled there into the night, lit by an unchecked fire that consumed a nearby office building. The military-appointed government issued a statement declaring that the military, the police and the people were “standing together in the face of the treacherous terrorist scheme against Egypt of the Brotherhood organization.” But the extent of the mayhem cast doubt on its ability to deliver on its central promise of restoring order and security.
France and Germany called for an emergency meeting of European foreign ministers to respond to Egypt’s violence. “The toll of death and injury is shocking,” said Catherine Aston, the top diplomat for the European Union. “Responsibility for this tragedy weighs heavily on the interim government, as well as on the wider political leadership in the country.”
Just two days earlier, the police had routed thousands of protesters from sit-ins in support of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, killing several hundred. The government suspended legal protections against arbitrary police action and authorized security forces to kill anyone who threatened a public facility.
For many on Friday, however, shock at the scale of the bloodshed began to outweigh the threats. The violence started soon after noon prayers, as thousands of Islamists marched in a last defense against a return to the era of political exclusion, imprisonment and torture they endured under 60 years of military-backed dictatorship.
For the first time since the president’s removal six weeks ago, some non-Islamists stood with the Morsi supporters, sometimes risking their own lives as well.
“Where are we going with this?” one young man asked another watching at the edge of the Ramses Square battle. “Are we just going to fight one another endlessly?”
His friend replied that he had protested against President Morsi, and that the police had protected him from threats. But now they were killing the Islamists, he said.
“They’re Egyptian, too,” he said. “Why were we safe while they’re being killed by the police?”
There was no sign that the chaos would end anytime soon. The Muslim Brotherhood, the main Islamist group behind Mr. Morsi, called for similar marches every day for the next week, and vowed to hold daily, nonviolent marches to Ramses Square for morning and evening prayers, declaring, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, that the bloodshed “irrigates the tree of liberty in Egypt.”
As they have since the ouster of Mr. Morsi, state and private news media cheered on the battle against the Brotherhood. “Egypt is fighting terrorism,” a deep voice intoned periodically over Egyptian state radio throughout the day; a similar slogan in English and Arabic flashed on state television.
ONtv, a private satellite network hostile to the Islamists, broadcast pictures of 60 detainees kneeling with bound hands in military custody. A headline on the screen described them as “militants.”
A government official holding them said that 40 of them, including a few foreigners, had been captured by civilians near Ramses Square before being turned over to the military.
Islamists in Turkey, Tunisia and Pakistan organized protests against the crackdown. But in Saudi Arabia, a fierce foe of the Brotherhood, King Abdullah delivered a televised statement pledging support for what he described as Egypt’s fight against “terrorism,” and he scolded the West for its criticism.
“The kingdom stands with Egypt and against all those who try to interfere with its internal affairs,” he said, adding, “Those who are interfering in its internal affairs are lighting the fire of strife and supporting the terrorism they had claimed to be fighting against.”
Outside Cairo, security officials said, the police broke up a pro-Morsi sit-in at the city of Qena, and the military killed protesters while breaking up another sit-in at the city of Suez. State news media reported that a crime wave had erupted in the security vacuum, with six banks robbed in Beni Suef and a museum looted in Minya.
In Cairo, marches denouncing the military takeover began at mosques around the city after noon prayers, and within an hour the city was all but paralyzed. Mr. Morsi’s supporters and civilian vigilantes opposing them both blocked roads, bridges, tunnels and highways.
Guns were visible in the hands of civilians on all sides, including a Morsi supporter filmed with a machine gun and peeking around a corner of the Four Seasons hotel in Giza as a gunfight broke out.
In many places, heavily armed civilian supporters of the new government carried or fired guns while soldiers and police watched. In other cases, civilians hurling rocks or wielding sticks advanced against opponents under the cover of police gunfire.
There also appeared to be provocateurs. At a pro-Morsi march, two masked men with machine guns seemed to pose as Islamists. First, they seemed to support the march, herding passers-by into its ranks. Then they aimed their guns at the terrified protesters, who fled in fear.
“Who are these men with guns?” one woman among the Morsi supporters asked in terror. “Are they with us or with them?”
Amr Darrag, 54, a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who spent the last month negotiating with Western diplomats over the crisis, said he had been in a march with his wife and daughters when they were fired upon by gunmen atop a hotel, and cornered from three sides on an overpass by a combination of security forces, firing tear gas, and armed civilians.
“We are dealing with vampires,” he said. “They intentionally killed us. My analysis is that they would like to force people to go to violence, because this is the only explanation.”
Thousands had gathered in Ramses Square when the fighting there began. A small group of young people started throwing rocks at a nearby police station, and others quickly moved to try to stop them.
Gunfire erupted from the police station soon after. Mohamed Abdel Salem, 19, said he happened to be walking by with a friend, Saed, 22, who was shot and killed by a police bullet. “Many died,” he said.
A military helicopter hovered low overhead as the crowd chanted, “There are the mass killers, there they are.”
By 3 a.m. Saturday, hundreds of protesters had taken refuge in a nearby mosque that for most of the day had served as a field hospital and morgue, refusing to leave for fear of arrests. Swarms of riot police officers and their supporters in civilian clothes began breaking down the doors, throwing rocks through the windows, and filling the mosque with tear gas. Among the Islamists killed in Ramses Square was Dr. Khaled el-Banna, 30, a grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan el-Banna, who was gunned down near the same square in 1949.
Kareem Fahim and Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from London.
quick news postsAugust 16, 2013
Two English Cities Battle in Court to Acquire Remains of King Richard III
By JOHN F. BURNS
LONDON — As if 500 years of ignominy lying in a grave hastily dug after his defeat in battle were not enough, King Richard III now faces a new battle in the English courts over which of two cities, Leicester or York, will be his final resting place.
A high court judge in London, Charles Haddon-Cave, ruled on Friday that a group backing York’s case, called the Plantagenet Alliance and involving several distant relatives of the slain monarch, could take legal action against the government and the University of Leicester.
The university has laid plans for Richard’s reinterment in Leicester based on a government license that authorized the dig that found the remains. The license specified that the university should decide where the dead king’s remains, if found, should be reburied.
The plans, already well developed, call for reinterment next May in an elaborate tomb in Leicester’s Anglican cathedral, and the opening of a $6.2 million visitors’ center that is expected to be a major tourist draw.
But in the case heard in London, York’s champions argued that Leicester was never more than a waypoint for Richard on his last night before the Battle of Bosworth Field on Aug. 22, 1485, 20 miles from Leicester. They contend that the slain king’s ancestral home, and the place he had designated as his preferred burial place, was York. They have described Leicester’s haste to lay permanent claim to Richard as a “hijack,” prompting some in the Leicester camp to retort, tartly, that king or not, it is a case of “finders keepers.”
The link with York was underscored by no less an authority than Shakespeare, who began his play “Richard III” with a monologue in which the future king, speaking as the Duke of Gloucester before the tortuous events that would make him monarch, speaks of his older brother, Edward IV, in one of the playwright’s most quoted lines, as a Yorkist. “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York,” Richard says, before laying out the treacherous schemes that form the webbing of Shakespeare’s work.
In his ruling on Friday, Judge Haddon-Cave urged Leicester and York to settle the case out of court and to not renew the animosities that drove the 15th-century period known as the Wars of the Roses, between two rival branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, the houses of York and Lancaster. The hostilities ended with Richard’s defeat at Bosworth Field, which gave rise to the Tudor kings under the Bosworth victor, Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII.
“In my view, it would be unseemly, undignified and unedifying to have a legal tussle over these royal remains,” the judge said, appealing to the two sides to avoid engaging in a “Wars of the Roses, Part 2.”
He added that it was inevitable that the question of Richard’s final burial place should arouse “intense, widespread and legitimate public interest” since it involved “the remains of a king of England of considerable historical significance, who died fighting a battle which brought to an end a civil war which divided this country.”
The contest between Leicester and York has taken place against the backdrop of renewed public and scholarly interest in Richard III.
In effect, the man depicted by Shakespeare as the wicked, hunchback murderer of his two nephew princes in the Tower of London, cast throughout succeeding history as England’s most reviled monarch, won the chance of a reappraisal last autumn when the skeletal remains later ruled to be his were unearthed beneath a municipal parking lot in the heart of Leicester.
The archaeological dig that found the remains, confirmed by DNA testing and other evidence, was undertaken after years of petitioning by the King Richard III Society, which is dedicated to a revisionist view of the monarch. After the success of the parking lot dig, the society’s enthusiasts have forecast a new age of scholarship that will reveal him as one of England’s most compassionate and reformist kings — and as a victim of the propaganda of his Tudor successors on the throne, and their in-house spin doctor, Shakespeare.
The new tomb in Leicester, hailed by its planners as fit for one of the few English monarchs not to be buried with high honors in London, would leave Richard not much more than a stone’s throw from the parking lot, which stood atop the scattered ruins of an ancient friary whose monks buried Richard after he was carried back to the city, naked and scorned by loyalists of the new Tudor King Henry VII, after Richard’s defeat in the Bosworth battle.
