On the plane back to London he suggested that she resign she declined but although subsequently she made huge
On the plane back to London he suggested that she resign; she declined, but although subsequently she made huge profits for Fuji - more than pounds 330,000 in 1988, for example - she was given derisory bonuses and "treated less favourably on the ground of her sex", as the tribunal put it, in numerous other ways.Resigning in 1994 she sued for sexual discrimination and won last November. Fuji then compounded the offence by refusing to negotiate compensation instead accusing her of trying to extort money from the company. will not be tolerated." While those accused of the harassment were apparently Americans working on the assembly line, the commission noted the activity could not have gone on "without the knowledge and consent ... of the management."The events in Normal may be entirely abnormal, a freak consequence of loss of management control. The vice-chairman of the Commission, Paul Igasaki, said, "This case should send the strongest message that sexual harassment ...
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that the women were subjected to a "hostile and abusive work environment", involving groping and fondling, lewd graffiti and obscene remarks. From the promisingly named town of Normal, Illinois, comes news that some 700 women employees at Mitsubishi Motor Company's plant there are to sue the giant Japanese company for sexual harassment - or seku-hara as it is called in Japanese. Some rice farmers use ducks instead of pesticides to keep down weeds in their paddy fields, with the result that the rice, the ducks and their eggs can all be labelled "organic".. Just as we were poised to discard the Victorian values thrust on us by Mrs Thatcher and embrace instead the "Asian values" expounded by Chris Patten, David Howell, and at times it seems Tony Blair, a timely note of warning has been sounded. Japan has a sophisticated system of co-operatives, known as san tyoku, in which city-dwellers band together to buy direct from farmers, who pool and deliver their produce. There are more than 600 such co-ops, the largest of which has 150,000 members. The most optimistic estimates suggest that between 2 and 3 per cent of fruit, vegetables and cereals in France could be biologically produced by the year 2000, as against 1 per cent today..
Organic farming is well-established in Japan, a nation obsessed with food purity. Almost every supermarket has a section devoted to organically- produced vegetables, rice, fruit and poultry, which cost roughly 20 per cent more than conventional fare, writes Raymond Whitaker. Since Japanese food prices are already excruciatingly steep by Western standards, thanks to heavy subsidies to farmers and high import barriers, organic produce might seem like a luxury. But Japanese consumers are inured to spending a higher proportion of their incomes on food than those in other countries, and organic farming has a high approval rate among people living in large cities - 93 per cent, according to one poll. Costs have been kept down, and farmers encouraged to switch to organic methods, by direct contact between consumers and producers. Consumption increased by 5 per cent between 1993 and 1994, and continues to rise. The Paris area has a dozen "green" markets, compared with only three, five years ago, while regular markets all over France often include at least one "bio" stall and many large supermarket chains offer "ecologically" produced vegetables.The problem is that production does not match demand and the wholesale network is poorly developed. There is also a tendency for "green" farmers to be highly specialised, whether in particular sorts of livestock farming, market-gardening or viticulture.These figures may, however, be deceptive.
It is said, for instance, that some "green" farmers choose not to register as such, some because they do not meet all the criteria, some because they regard the 3,000-franc annual registration fee as too expensive and the bureaucracy burdensome.For all the popular scorn meted out to the idea of "l'agriculture biologique", there is a proven demand for "green" agricultural products in France, and it was growing well before the problem of British beef emerged. Agriculture ministry statistics give the proportion of farmers meeting the strict EU criteria for "green" farming as only three in 1,000 farmers. This, however, is still quite a large area of land - roughly equivalent to the surface area of orchards producing eating apples. And while the number of farmers registered as practising "green" farming has remained almost static since 1990, at around 3,700 (although there was a dip down to 2,600 in the early Nineties), the area of land farmed ecologically has increased by 10 per cent to 60,000 hectares. The biggest farmers' union, the FNSEA, said that between 1 and 2 per cent of farmers might practise some aspects of "green" farming, but that very few used no chemical pesticides at all. The second is to dismiss it as little more than a fashionable hobby for middle-class people with nothing better to do.