This past week, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission officially warned Nippon Professional Baseball that it was believed to be illegal by requiring players agents be licensed attorneys in Japan. The news came with the acknowledgement that NPB had rescinded that law on Sept. 2 having been informed in August of a potential breach.
What’s interesting here is not that the rule may have been illegal, but that it came under the heading of antitrust law, which is, according to Evan Drellich of THE ATHLETIC, where the Japanese Professional Baseball Players Association is now pursuing a course of action to reduce the service time needed to file for unrestricted free agency.
Unlike in Major League Baseball Inc., free agency in Japan’s major leagues was not the result of labor action and negotiation with management, but a system forced upon most of NPB’s teams unwillingly so that the Yomiuri Giants and the then Daiei Hawks would be able to use their financial leverage to scoop up other teams’ big-name veterans.
Because Japan’s judiciary has, in my view, unreasonably favored the teams in the players’ struggle to control their own image rights, my first reaction to the free agency effort was unenthusiastic about its success. But recent labor negotiations at the day job made me realize there may be a huge opening here for the union.
Japanese companies typically have employment contracts that require all parties to abide by its rules of employment that govern more details about working conditions. These typically only change in favor of employees when the labor law changes – and then when companies find loopholes that allow them to screw employees out of extra cash and still comply with the law, the rules change again.
Employees, however, have protection. Under Japan’s labor law, companies cannot arbitrarily impose new working conditions on unionized employees without advance notification and agreement of their union. It doesn’t keep companies from doing it anyway.
Because the free agent system was imposed as a new working condition, and because NPB’s owners are as arrogant as most companies in the belief that, as business giants, they know what they are doing even when they don’t – the problem that led to the 2004 labor strike. My guess is that the details of free agency represent a change to the working conditions that the union never officially agreed to.
That might not be the case, but this latest antitrust issue makes me think that this rule change might have been some early spillover after the union’s lawyers began to talking to officials and researching their effort to rewrite Japan’s free agency.
