Editing Assistant Language Teacher (section)

==Union activity==

===Education law===

Some of the contracts that school boards have signed with private language teaching companies are illegal ''gyomu itaku'' (service contracts). According to the Japanese Ministry of Education, these contracts violate Japan's General Education Law since the principal must be in charge of all staff at their school.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://alt.150m.com/ |title=Gyomu Itaku Contracts are Illegal |date=February 2005 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110707055156/http://alt.150m.com/ |archivedate=2011-07-07 }}</ref> However, with these contracts, the company is actually in charge – not the principal.

The licensed Japanese teacher is normally in charge of junior high school and high school classes regardless of where the ALT originates; however in the case of elementary school classes, the ALT is normally responsible for the entire class, with the Japanese teacher either providing limited input or in some cases not being present in the classroom, and for that reason the continuity of school management is sometimes maintained with the school principal in compliance with any legal requirements, as the product being contracted itself is an abstract, education, and the contract basis for private language teaching corporations is to provide education and educational services.{{Citation needed|date=October 2007}}

===29.5 hours per week===

It is common for ALTs to be recruited with job contracts with private language companies such as W5, [[Interac (Japan)|Interac]], Borderlink and WING which stipulates ALT working hours as being 29.5 hours per week. In actuality, working hours usually range from 30 to 40 hours due to the fact that transition times between classes and other brief periods of time throughout the working day are scheduled as breaktimes. Employers often have employees sign such contracts in an effort to avoid paying into the employer based Social Insurance program, or [[Social welfare in Japan|''shakai hoken'']]. While Social Insurance law states that all regular employees should be enrolled by their employer in Shakai Hoken, some companies will consistently tell their employees that they are ineligible. Their reasoning is that the 29.5 hours a week working time written into the contracts fall below an erroneous minimum of 3/4 full-time necessary for eligibility. The Social Insurance Agency uses the 3/4 of the hours of a similar full-time as a guideline.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://search.japantimes.co.jp/rss/nn20080105f1.html|author=Kanako Takahara|title=Assistant language teachers in trying times|publisher=The Japan Times Online|date=January 5, 2008}}</ref>  However, the Japanese government has recent stated that there is, in fact, no minimum legal work time requirement for enrollment in Shakai Hoken. Furthermore, no company would ever be prohibited from enrolling their employees in the Social Insurance program.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://interacunion.org/to-interac-info-on-health-insurance/|title=To Interac: Info on Health Insurance|publisher=Nambu Foreign Workers Caucus|date=November 5, 2009}}</ref> Some AETs dispatched to the City of [[Nagoya]] have a 35-hour work week and are not enrolled in Shakai Hoken, receive no paid sick leave, no paid holidays, no paid vacation leave, and are not enrolled in unemployment insurance. They are only paid for days worked and receive no pay between semesters except for a few training sessions.

===Kanagawa Board of Education===

In 2006, ALTs in [[Kanagawa Prefecture]] who were previously hired directly as part-time workers rejected the privatization of their jobs to Interac, a nationwide language services dispatch company, and took the Kanagawa Prefecture Board of Education to the Labour Relations Board where the case is still on-going.

As in many cases, the likely cause of the dissolution of the direct-hire situation draws back to Prime Minister [[Junichiro Koizumi]] who took a hard-line stance on privatization (e.g. Japan Post) and the idea of allowing local governments more flexibility in deciding how to spend their budgets.

===Other local Boards of Education===

The General Workers Union has been involved with several boards of education in the Kanto area including the Tokyo Board of Education, the Koga Board of Education (in [[Ibaraki Prefecture]]) and the Fukaya Board of Education (in [[Saitama Prefecture]]). In the case versus the Tokyo Board of Education, the General Workers Union won a decision stating that the directly hired ALTs were indeed legally classified as "workers" (''rodosha'') and not simply contractors. Further victories were achieved through the private companies that had contracts with the Koga and Fukaya boards of education.