NAGASAKI – An English teacher whose employment contract with Nagasaki University was terminated just before he would have been eligible to claim an unfixed term is set to return to work indefinitely after a court settlement.
I don’t understand this. I am totally happy for the guy and he obviously deserves it. It’s a total dick move to fire someone so close to their retirement but the law is still very confusing.
His contracts totaled 8 years which would make him eligible for the conversion but the article says he was just short of the 5 years. Does the law only considered contracts signed after the law passed? If so isn’t the entire point of the 5 year duration that employers can terminate the contract just before that time?
Do you manually have to apply to convert the contract to indefinitely after 5 years and if you don’t you don’t get the benefits? In which case again, why did he receive the “special” treatment?
I have way more questions than answers after reading the article.
He was already 2 years in to a 3 year contract when the 5 year law came into effect. Renewed for 3 more = 3 + 1, then 1 month shy of 2 more = <5+1. I believe the reason is his total employed period actually exceeded 5 years if you consider the portion that partially overlapped at the start of the law.
Five years starting from when the law was enacted, I believe.
By law they need a clear reason to let you go if your contract has been renewed before. My guess is that they didn’t have the right paperwork in place when he recontracted. But I don’t know.
Update: I was correct. They did recontracting in Japanese, and he didn’t read it well. So they extended for two years knowing he thought it was three years. If they had made everything clear, by writing in a language he speaks, and had clearly showed the end date, perhaps he would not have had a case. Of course they pretended they thought he could read Japanese, but labor law is not exactly on their side here. Employers have an obligation to provide documents in languages that employees can read. And his original contract was in English (and Japanese), so they had the knowledge and capability to do so. In summary, contract fraud.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20190826/p2a/00m/0dm/013000c
