Hard work does pay off!!!

As most of you know for the past 2.5 months we have been in a battle with our former Japanese employer NOVA due to a delayed salary payment.

The financial issues with the company are still causing thousands of current employees a great deal of stress as they are not being paid on a consistent basis. Since we are back home and not 100% sure of what is actually going down in Japan, we decided we didn't want to turn a blind eye to the situation and just hope we got paid.

Ever since we caught wind of the problems NOVA had been having we tried to get a hold of as many people as we could to get some answers. We kept hearing the same thing "We aren't too sure what is going on yet, but we will let you know as soon as we hear something." OR "Please wait one more week." BLAH BLAH BLAH...that is what it eventually started to sound like.

I let Jamie do a lot of the calling because frankly this whole situation and the meaningless answers we were getting were really fueling my anger. I didn't want to upset someone on the other end and make things worse. Jamie is the most cool and collected guy I have ever met (and that's why I love him), so I figured it would be best if he did the telephoning.

Countless phone-calls and emails were made to the following people : NOVA personnel in Osaka, the NOVA recruitment office in Toronto, Foreign Affairs, the Japanese Consulate, lawyers both here and Japan, and the General Union's office.

As of today we received this email:

Dear Sara Manning and Jamie McDowell,

We received news from the accounting section today that your salary payment has been processed. This means that you should receive it soon depending on the bank processing time.

The overseas electronic bank transfer processing time can take up to two weeks depending on the bank but please be assured that everything has been completed from our end.

We apologise deeply for the long delay in receiving your final salary.

Regards Personnel Quality Control Group West
Japanosaka_personnel@nova.ne.jp
Tel: (06) 7688-0404Fax: (06) 7688-0401

This is HUGE for us!! We don't want to get too excited until the money is actually in our bank account, but the fact that we have made a breakthrough is wonderful. Our money was sitting in the accounting department this whole time; we were just waiting for the NOVA president to authorize it. Now it is out of NOVA's hands and we just have to wait for the transfer to go through.

We have made it this far, now let's hope there is a nice lil' increase $$$ in our bank account in the next couple of weeks.