'I Guess I Was Just Mad'

摘要

Miho Marui isn't exactly sure how she wound up standing on top of a bus on a wintry Tokyo day in 2009, staring up at the 35-story headquarters of KDDI. Yet there she was, hands trembling as she shouted at her bosses through a loudspeaker. Co-workers pressed against the windows to watch her pick a fight with Japan's second-largest phone company over labor practices at one of its subsidiaries. "I guess I was just mad," says Marui, a trained marine biologist and University of Tokyo graduate, who together with a friend started Japan's first union for temporary and part-time workers. Marui has drawn unflattering attention to the treatment of the country's mostly female temporary labor force. In April a Tokyo court recommended a settlement for a wage-discrimination lawsuit she and others filed in late 2010 against the subsidiary, KDDI Evolva.