Hello all,
I am a part-time adjunct professor at a university. I have worked there for 7 years. I am a contracted worker with a revolving yearly contract, though I have not requested the mukirodo keiyakyu (無期労働契約) that you are entitled to after having been employed as a contracted employee for 5 years.
I have been dealing with a supervisor (for some years) who is messaging me late in the evening on LINE and expecting for me to respond to work related conversation late at night. In addition to this, last year, this person also threatened to change my classes unless I helped to find a new hire, which I cheerfully did because I did not want to be negatively effected.
I have written records of these instances.
Recently this person has been trying to make me attend meetings which I cannot attend. The supervisor has tried to pressure me and convince me to just make time for her. I have grown very tired of this behavior.
I believe that these actions fit a sort of pattern of power harassment so I wrote a detailed report and sent it to the kyomu division of the university.
I received a message back from a board member explaining that he would like to meet with me. In his email he asked me to back up ALL of my email and correspondence with the supervisor as I will be required to submit ALL of it.
Have replied with a boiler plate “thank you for always supporting me, I understand, yoroshiku” type email.
**Questions**
1) Do I need to hire a lawyer to help me deal with this?
2) Is the part about submitting every contact ever a reasonable ask by a reviewing counselor? (I have reported specific examples and incidences. Most of my conversation otherwise is me sucking up to the supervisor so that she doesn’t mess with my classes. So it looks like both of us being very happy with each other.)
3) What would you do in a similar situation?
5 comments
Have you got in touch with a union? If you dig through the r/teachinginjapan sub you should be able to find contact details. I’ve not had any dealings with them before, but they seem quite active and would be probably be interested or at least able to advise you to some extent.
Gathering all the data seems normal to avoid people omitting things that would provide context.
Including things where you are acting professionally,
Even sucking up, should not negate any evidence of power harassment.
Did you seek advice before submitted your report? I don’t work in academia but I suspect the bar is quite high to prove harassment. Set yourself up for disappointment.
Can’t see why you’d need a lawyer unless you think the gun will be turned on you.
I work at a high school and a teacher quit and tried to sue for damages based on power harassment. The texts and evidence she submitted seemed quite damning until the accused members of staff provided all the rest of the communications for context and it proved she just cherry picked things to make herself look like the victim. They’ll need to see everything you and your supervisor ever sent each other if they’re going to judge it fairly.
1) Not yet but research to be ready for the next step.
2) Totally reasonable as they need context – prepare it as requested, but also prepare a “short version” of any harassing content (be sure to provide dates etc. so they can correlate with the main contents to see context if desired).
3) Get ready for court – the university likely won’t do much, and you’ll probably need to sue. Keep all future communication in writing, they cannot legally penalise/fire you for this, and some places do try to do this. Also keep in mind that you can directly sue the professor as well, not just the institution. Many lawyers will take these cases on contingency (they take a percentage of court awards).
Sorry op, tough situation.
Why did you not wait until after you have dealt with the mukirodo keiyakyu (無期労働契約) before submitting the harassment report?
You would have had stronger footing.From the universities perspective not rehiring you might be the easiest things for them regardless of ethics or morality.