On the 27th, the Tokyo District Court ruled in a case in which 29 members of the Japan Cabin Crew Union (JCU) demanded KLM withdraw its decision to terminate employment of Japanese flight attendants in order to avoid a five-year indefinite turnover period. The court ruled that all of the plaintiffs had been granted indefinite transfers of employment and that the stoppage of their employment was invalid.
Since July 2018, KLM has been forcing Japanese contract-based flight attendants to stop their employment just before they became entitled to a permanent change of employment after five years of continuous employment.
Dutch law has a provision that a fixed-term worker is deemed to be employed for an indefinite period of time if his/her employment continues for more than three years. The plaintiffs argued that Dutch law applied and that they were entitled to a permanent transfer of employment.
KLM’s recruitment procedures, training, and scheduling of Japanese flight attendants are also conducted at the company’s headquarters in the Netherlands, and the ruling applied Dutch law based on the “Act on General Rules,” which stipulates the legal application of international contracts, and approved the indefinite transfer.
At a press conference held at the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare after the ruling, the plaintiff woman said, “I was offered a contract with a upper limit on it just before my contract was up for renewal, and was wrongly told that foreigners could only work in the Netherlands under a fixed-term contract. No easy way to cut off workers who protect the safety of the skies is acceptable,” she stressed.
The Tokyo District Court also ruled against KLM in January last year, invalidating the termination of three other JCU members who had been employed for more than five years, including a two-month training period, on the grounds that they had already been converted to permanent transfer.
