Canadian single dad claims Japanese bosses harassed him
When Glen Wood told his Japanese bosses he intended to take paternity leave to look after his newborn son, the Canadian financial analyst said he was treated “like I had committed some sort of crime.”
The 47-year-old single father and former manager of global sales at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co. in Tokyo alleges he was harassed to the point of mental and physical collapse after he exercised his right to a leave when his son Alexander was born two years ago.
His lawyers have filed a temporary injunction against the Japanese brokerage and have asked a Tokyo court to order the firm reinstate him to full employee status.
The company said it encourages its employees to take parental leave. But Wood said he’s a victim of what is known in Japan as patahara — paternity harassment.
Wood said he was incrementally demoted before he was put on unpaid leave in October after rejecting what he said amounted to a low-level clerical position and a more than 50-per-cent pay cut.
“It was like junior high school girls’ type of behaviour — they shut me out,” he said.
In an email to the Post, MUFJ Morgan Stanley said it has “actively encouraged the taking of child care leave for some time, and addressed the taking of child care leave by Mr. Glen in good faith.”
Wood was raised on his mother’s family’s farm in St. Ann’s, Ont., and attended university in the U.S. on scholarships. He holds an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and, over his 18-year career as a financial analyst, he has worked at Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs. Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley hired him about six years ago.
According to his lawyers, Wood was harassed solely because he decided to have a child.
“Japanese view employees basically as soldiers,” said Wood, who is fluent in the language. “You’re 100 per cent committed to the company. Men basically don’t go home and, if they try to spend time with family, it is a very negative thing.”
But full-time employees are hard to fire because of rigid labour laws and employer contracts, he said. “If they don’t like someone for some reason, they harass them until they quit.”
In August 2015, Wood told his bosses he and his partner were going to have a baby. (He’s now raising the child as a single father.) When he informed them he would need to take a leave, “they were very negative. Their first response was ‘no, there’s nothing, you just can’t do it.’” His son was born in October of that year. Wood was eventually granted leave in December after a DNA test proved paternity.
When Wood returned to work three months later, after hiring a full-time nurse, “the first day back my boss called me in and said, ‘you’ve got a child now and basically you can’t do your job.’”