Union expands membership by sharing activities in manga

School cooks who are members of a union of Kurashiki City workers have been sharing their union activities and achievements by publishing monthly comic-based newsletters.

When one of the cooks, Yumi Matsui, explained wage and working conditions to new union members, one of them told her, “Manga would have been easier to understand.” Matsui had been feeling the same way for a long time.

Although she had no idea of how to draw comics, Matsui and her colleagues spent a week completing their first manga newsletter and published it in January. It received favorable reviews from workers, including nonunionized ones. Some of them said, “This helps me understand how our salaries are defined,” and, “I realized that the union is working hard for us.”

In the following month, the editors shared members’ stories in manga, which described what had brought them to the union.

The unique effort has been steadily bringing new members to the union. Matsui said, “It was hard to draw manga with no experience, but I learned the importance of sending our messages and being creative.”