AISIN’s Stance on Labor-Management
AISIN’s Stance on Labor-Management Relations with Lessons Learned from Labor Dispute in India
(1) Overview of AHL labor dispute
In May 2017, a consolidated subsidiary Aisin Automotive Haryana Pvt. Ltd. (AHL) located in Rohtak, Haryana State, India experienced a strike by its employees demanding the establishment of a trade union at AHL. The employees’ application for a trade union was rejected by the local government and a strike ban was announced one month later, and the strike came to an end. Unfortunately, employees continued the strike without government permission and 288 employees who used force to blockade the company gate were arrested.
And AHL finally dismissed 175 employees who continued absenteeism after the strike, although they had been called to come back to work many times by AHL. Aisin believes that it was an unavoidable response to protect the lives and safety of employees not involved in the dispute, however, this incident was the largest labor dispute in the history of the Aisin Group leaving a negative effect on both employees and management at AHL. Aisin regrets that this incident caused great concern to our stakeholders, including the local community and business partners.
(2) Measures to prevent recurrence
In Aisin Group
Based on this experience, the Aisin Group has used the AHL incident as a lesson in employee/management relations. We believe that “in order for a company to grow, it is essential for both employees and management to listen to each other, count on each other, and build cooperation between the parties”. Taking this AHL labor dispute as an opportunity, we have written “AISIN's Stance on Labor Relations,” and have promoted the Stance to all Aisin Group companies as message mandate from Aisin Group’s President in order to reaffirm and reinforce the idea that “it is essential for both employees and management to trust each other and to build cooperative relations,” even overseas where labor practices may differ from Japan.
In addition, we have reviewed the AISIN Group Principles of Corporate Behavior shared by all the Aisin Group employees as a Code of Conduct used to fulfill their responsibility to society based on the Corporate Principles. Additionally, we are implementing it as the Action Guidelines common to the Aisin Group, by strengthening our perspectives of “respecting human rights” and “realizing diverse ways of working” more than ever.
Furthermore, we have developed an assessment tool to confirm that employee relations and labor operations are conducted appropriately and in line with AISIN's Stance on Labor Relations, and we are continuously checking it globally. We have established a system to identify problems and when they are found during inspection, they can be immediately improved upon based on the predetermined rules.
In AHL
On August 4, 2017, Ihara President ( President at that time of Former Aisin Seiki ) , directly explained to team members at AHL, as well as reflection on management, Aisin's labor-management standpoint and declared a new start.
After that, after normal operations were restored at AHL, AHL has been restructuring the communication system between employees and management such as “improving a place to exchange opinions between employees and management”, “building a highly transparent and fair personnel system”, and “holding various informal events” to improve the labor-management relations.
The positive opinion rate in the employees satisfaction survey, which was initially 40%, reached 90% in the survey of January 2019. Aiming for 100% positive opinion rate, we will further enhance the measures to improve employee/management relations.
(3) Declaration for the future
Using the AHL labor dispute as a lesson, the Aisin Group aims to build a company that all employees are proud of with the goal of avoiding any similar issues at any Aisin company in the future.
