Recently, there seems to have been an increase in discrimination lawsuits and related legal disputes.
The Me Too movement focused on sexual harassment, but the scope of discrimination has now expanded beyond sexual pressure on employees to include age, gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, military service, and other areas. A legal website that I follow has also recently started publishing a newsletter dedicated specifically to discrimination-related news.
Distribution of Discrimination Lawsuits
Just as sexual harassment lawsuits increased rapidly with the Me Too movement, discrimination lawsuits may also be increasing as the concept of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) gains greater social recognition. The following data from 2019 shows the distribution of different types of discrimination charges. (Source)
- Retaliation: 39,110 (53.8% of all charges filed)
- Disability: 24,238 (33.4%)
- Race: 23,976 (33.0%)
- Sex: 23,532 (32.4%)
- Age: 15,573 (21.4%)
- National Origin: 7,009 (9.6%)
- Color: 3,415 (4.7%)
- Religion: 2,725 (3.7%)
- Equal Pay Act: 1,117 (1.5%)
- Genetic Information: 209 (0.3%)
Recent Discrimination Lawsuits Involving Japanese Companies
In March 2022, an Ohio district court ruled that Fujitec’s Japanese headquarters could also be held responsible in a lawsuit involving Fujitec America. The case concerned racial discrimination in which a Black legal executive was paid a lower salary and bonuses than his white colleagues.
The following April, Sony Entertainment faced the possibility of a class-action lawsuit over serious allegations of company-wide gender discrimination involving the failure to promote women.
What is noteworthy here is that, although both companies are Japanese-owned, these discrimination lawsuits involved very little direct participation by Japanese employees.
Perhaps both the headquarters and the local subsidiaries had assumed that discrimination lawsuits would not occur because their management teams were American.
Alternatively, they may have hesitated to impose compliance requirements, assuming that American executives would naturally be familiar with discrimination and other compliance issues and would handle them properly without additional direction.
In fact, I have heard that Sony is a company that pays very close attention to compliance. I remember meeting a Sony employee in London about 20 years ago who told me, “There are so many things we have to study and rules we have to follow. It’s difficult.”
Even so, incidents like these have occurred.
Human Nature and Discrimination
I think many Japanese people have difficulty fully understanding discrimination. As demonstrated by the recent controversy surrounding remarks made by a Yoshinoya executive, many people seem unaware of what kinds of words can hurt others. This is what it means to have a low level of awareness.
Some people even explicitly claim that “there is no discrimination in Japan,” making me wonder whether there is a privileged class, particularly among men, who do not personally experience discrimination.
However, what we must recognize is that discriminatory remarks and actual discrimination occur even in countries, including the United States, that are said to have greater awareness of these issues than Japan.
No one is free from discriminatory attitudes.
In fact, everyone has “unconscious bias,” or discriminatory attitudes of which they are not personally aware. Having a high level of awareness simply means being conscious of one’s own discriminatory tendencies and knowing how to conceal them.
Human Instincts and Discrimination
Human beings have a competitive instinct that helps them survive.
This competitive instinct leads us to compare ourselves with others, and these comparisons lead to discrimination.
People want to feel secure by placing themselves in a superior position: above another person, another group of people, people from another country, or people in another occupation.
By doing so, they feel that they can escape competition, even if only for a short time.
In this sense, everyone possesses the deeply rooted emotion that leads to discrimination.
America’s Challenge to Discrimination
The United States today can be described as a country that has begun making efforts to control the discriminatory tendencies that all human beings possess through a level of intelligence and understanding that rises above instinct.
That is precisely why education is necessary.
Intellectual awareness can only be developed through repeated exposure to information and education, and it is only through this process that discriminatory tendencies can be controlled.
We have now entered an era in which companies that have overlooked discrimination can face serious penalties from society.
Corporate efforts to raise awareness of discrimination are receiving increasing attention.