Why January 26th?

Did you say kando or kanchou?

January 26th of 2011, Yamaha motor workers in Spain awoke surprised by a shocking piece of new; the European direction had decided to close the Spanish factory and move its motorbike production to France.

Nobody was warned in advance, the Japanese staff decided to broke with decades of good manners and delicate style of doing and changed its communication strategy by putting themselves at the same level of the worst companies in the world, and at the same time embarrassing all the Japanese people.

Happy ending?

We’ve got big news! We were waiting for a confirmation of the date, as newspapers from Catalunya say April, 1st while newspapers from Aragon say May, 1st, but as we couldn’t confirm any of the dates we decided share the good news with you right now.

Yamaha and Sesé have reached the best agreement in Spanish history!An agreement by which Sesé will buy YMES’ factory together with all its employees. Sesé has promised to keep our jobs for at least two years, and Yamaha will give us a compensation of 4000 euros plus 55 days per year if we enter Sesé and 8000 euro plus 80 days per year if we find a job somewhere else. With a maximum of 80000 euros, though.

It’s a win-win agreement: Yamaha finally gets its target (to concentrate all European production in the most expensive factory). Sesé gets the factory premises and highly-motivated employees to start its way into the industrial world. And we, the workers, do not lose our jobs, finally get rid of Yamaha (who would like to work for a company that treats its workers in the way that Yamaha treated us?) and, also receive a generous compensation.

And we owe it all to our Work Union friends.Thank you, guys, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We may have not always approved your methods, but in the end all that’s left to do is taking our hat off to you. You have fought with honor (which unfortunately we cannot say about Yamaha, who has been leading one of the dirtiest wars in history against its own workers) and you have won. We will never be able to thank  you enough.
We know that you have not been alone. Many people have helped you, some of them more, some of them less, according to each one’s possibilities. Maybe with a song, or a drawing, or a phone call. To all of you anonymous allies who are smiling in reading this, big thanks to you to from the bottom of our hearts. You too made it possible.
And last, to tell don Alfonso that it will be a pleasure to work for him, and that he won’t regret standing up for us. As we mentioned on the first post, (even though at the time we meant Yamaha), “you won’t find workers more united and more willing to work than YMES’”.

Happy new year!

A very special year for YMES has started. Special because it’s been a year since they announced they would close our factory and still we are working for Yamaha now. We owe it to our working union and to the fact that the workers have always been united.

And, so far, it seems like we will continue working for Yamaha, as Mr. Sesé himself (the owner of the company that was meant to buy us) has said, in front of the Labour authority, the working union and Yamaha’s lawyers that he would give up the purchase in case there was no “social peace” at YMES. In that case, Yamaha will have to find a new investor, we couldn’t care less. Either they start the process again or they give us a generous compensation so Yamaha is finally at peace and Mr. Sesé agrees to buy us. Honestly, we really don’t think that 15 days per year is compensates enough all the suffering we have gone through these months.

By the way, we have found that the company’s lawyers, the famous Quatrecasas, are being investigated for allegedly committing a 3.5 million euro tax evasion. Good luck!

Finally, we would like to recall our friend Judith, who is not working with us anymore, and thank her for the Spanish ham we have enjoyed toasting to her health.

Yamaha’s word

This time, we are not giving you our opinion. Please judge by yourselves.
This are the meeting minutes of the mediation meeting celebrated on September the 7th with the Catalan Government mediator.

It says the following:

“The social party (the Work Union) makes the following proposal:

1.-To assume the commitments made in looking for an industrial plan.

2.-The workers’ representation will check whether the company is solvent and reputable or not, and whether it can assume enough employment or not.

3.- Even if the company is solvent, the contractual relation is between the workers and Yamaha Motor Spain. The termination of such relation shall entail the corresponding compensation before entering the new company.

In turn, the company’s representatives assume the items proposed by the social party.”

The meeting minutes are signed by the company’s lawyers (Mr Puigbó and Mr Agote), by the General Manager (Mr Escribese) and by Mr Suzuki, representing the Japanese staff.

Two months later, they say that “nothing obliges them to give us a
compensation” and they try to impose the sale to a company the Work Union has not checked, saying as well on the press that “they commit themselves in front of the Catalan government” to keep on working with the main suppliers, to keep working with the Plastic Paint section for three years and so and so.

What credibility has Yamaha’s word now, even in front of the Catalan government? Judge it by yourselves.

Yamaha Motor Marketing’s destination

Last week the rumors were officialy confirmed: they are planning to move our Yamaha Motor Marketing mates to right the other side of Barcelona, close to the airport. This will be very convenient for visitors from Japan or The Netherlands, but for many workers it will mean that they will have to spend much more time in commuting, which means a big loss in quality of life.

In fact, more than 70% of Yamaha Motor Marketing’s workers signed a declaration asking the top management to find offices that were closer to the area where most workers live. They never got an answer, and their request has been obviously ignored.

Is it a new kind of mobbing, so that people just leave their jobs and therefore do not have to be fired (so they get no compensation)? It seems quite strange that a company that apparently still wants to sell its products in Spain (which, by the way, is the second biggest market in Europe) decides to demotivate all its sales force at once.

We will miss you, mates! Be strong!

We’re still here

As you can see, we’re still at WordPress. We have not published anything in a while due to the lack of news, but we will update you with the little news we have had during the summer.

Yamaha is not working with Baker&McKenzie anymore. We don’t know whether they’ve been fired or it’s them being fed up with their clients. The way things are going, none of them would be a surprise. In their place, they are working now with Cuatrecasas, a lawyer’s office well-known at the Anti-corruption and Organized Crime Prosecutor’s Office for defending the Russian mafia.

What can we say? To Baker&McKenzie, just to tell them that there are nobler ways to do things. That, even if we’re just a bunch of strangers, we are still human beings and there was no need to try and torture us with your ruses and your journalists on hire. Did you know that some of our mates had sick leaves for serious nervous breakdowns during the process? I don’t think any business is worth making an innocent human being become ill (a human being that has suffered enough by being told he/she would lose his/her job). It is not that hard to make things right.

To Cuatrecasas, just tell them to learn from Baker’s mistakes and that we expect them to handle the Yamaha file with more dignity than Baker&McKenzie did.

From France, we have heard that the Yamaha group has spent 10 million euros in the early retirement of 30 MBK’s employees.

Considering that information, Yamaha has committed itself in front of the Catalan authorities and in writing to find another job for YMES’ workers and to offer them a compensation as well.

To finish with, there is the company’s split which becomes effective by this month. The commercial part and the industrial part shall be separated, becoming two different companies: YMES and Yamaha Motor Marketing. What for? Obviously, to bring the factory into red figures and, incidentally, fire some commercial area people at the same time. It is so obvious that it has been reported to the authorities from July. We are all curious for seeing the Catalan government’s reaction if someday Yamaha presents a collective dismissal procedure due to a deficit they have created themselves.

Miscellanea

It has been quite a while since we last posted something, because there have not been big news. It seems that the company has finally understood that they can’t close YMES unless they reach an agreement with its workers. So they are studying alternatives, companies which could be interested in our equipments and in a young, well-prepared and willing-to-work staff. In exchange, we only ask for a company with competent managers who care more about the company’s interests than about their own pride. And if it could be a motorcycle company who can guarantee our suppliers’ future, it would be great! But that can take months or even years, so in the meanwhile we still work for Yamaha.
We have also heard that the audited results for MBK in 2010 have been made public. No less than 120 million euro in debts! Unbelievable!
On the other hand, we have received a notice from WordPress saying that Baker&McKenzie California has got a court order to force them into providing them our data. On behalf of Yamaha, of course! Honestly, how low is that?! It reminds me of the time when they contacted the Spanish Society of Authors to see if they could sue us for having made the Yamaha song. It was a pity that the author of the song was one of YMES’ workers, wasn’t it?
By the way, it is curious that right now, Judit Miret, our Human Resources manager is in California too, enjoying some holidays she has not earned according to Spanish law. Trying to destroy your workers’ freedom of speech while on holidays with your family. What a nice example for your children! I bet they’ll be proud of you!
What we get from this is that Yamaha Motor does NOT want you to know what is happening at YMES. Why? And, since we’re not doing anything illegal (journalism is not a crime), they had to come to the country where everything is suable in order to shut us up.
But, as Eri Nemoto said once, and we believe she was right, “There is no use in setting doors at the countryside”, and much less at the Internet. If they finally get to close this blog with their dirty tricks, you will only have to type the right keywords in your search engine to find us in any other corner of cyberspace. At the end of the day, we have always told you nothing but the truth, and that is what we’ll keep doing.

See you soon, guys! Here or everywhere else. We’ll keep you informed.

The judge summons Yamaha Spain’s CEO for allegedly spying on the workers’ union

El Confidencial newspaper, June 16th 2011

Mr Hiroshi Tanaka, who had been until some days ago Yamaha’s CEO in Spain, will have to appear next June, 27th, before Sabadell’s Magistrates’ Court number 4 for an alleged industrial espionage on the workers’ union. The facts took place in March, when the union members were not able to access their e-mail accounts. ”Two unidentified people alien to the company came and copied all the staff’s communications. The worst thing is that all that happened right at the moment when the company and the workers were in the middle of a collective dismissal procedure negotiation for Yamaha to definitely close its Spanish factory”, declared to El Confidencial Lluís Salvadores, the lawyer who filed a lawsuit for this reason. In the same lawsuit charging Mr Tanaka are also charged the Human Resources general manager, César Ruano, and IT general manager, Juan Francisco Sierra. Both defendants have already declared before the judge that the order to copy communications had come from the multinational’s CEO and that it was due to a “general IT audit”. They also involved in this activity the person in charge for European IT, Kojiro Iwasawa, against whom the workers’union is studying to start legal actions. E-mail blocking took place on the 9th of March. The company had handed in a collective dismissal procedure report the 2nd of the same month, intending to transfer all its production to the French town of Saint-Quentin, a town which, by the way, is where the French Industry minister is from. “When we arrived to the office, we noticed it was not working. We went up to ask for explanations and we found two outsiders who were copying all the documents and e- mails. Then, we called the police, they put that on record and afterwards, we filed the lawsuit”, pointed out to this newspaper Óscar Rivera, Yamaha’s CCOO workers’ union secretary general. The governments’ opposition No one understands the multinational’s decision to close the Spanish factory. “In the 30 years the factory has been working, Yamaha has always had benefits, except for 2009, when there were 5 million euro losses. But, if we check the French factory’s figures, that year they had 24 millions in red figures”, said Rivera. Therefore the workers’ union insists that there are no objective reasons for Palau-Solità i Plegamans’ factory closing. Francesc Xavier Mena, the Catalan minister for Companies and Employment also understands it in the same way, and he had announced to the multinational that the Catalan government did not see any reasons for approving the collective dismissal procedure. That is why Yamaha decided to withdraw the procedure by the end of April, even though in its road map there is still the intention to leave Spain and move to France due to the sales’ decrease by 47% in three years. Also, these weeks they have been sending some components to the Saint-Quentin factory, presumably to start their French validation. However, this action did not affect the Barcelona’s factory production. Last Monday, the workers’ representatives had a meeting with the Spanish Industry General Director, Jesús Candil, to communicate him their worries about the production transfer. “The General Director told us that the Spanish Government is against the closure and that they would do everything possible to stop it. He also promised us that the Spanish Government will help the Catalan Government as much as possible so that Yamaha stays in Spain and keeps both its production capacity and its jobs.” The company has 500 direct employees in total, counting both factory and commercial staff. But it is also a key industry in the Vallès area, where it is located. The half-a-dozen motorcycle companies working in Catalunya give jobs to around 25.000 workers.