The MABT is a union of members of the Tokyo American Club. If you have a general suggestion of how to make the club better, please add it below. Please feel free to be honest and direct but please focus on helping to propose a solution. We can all read complaints but we act better on solution.
Looking forward to hearing your ideas and implementing them.
The Making A Better TAC (MABT) Team
Dear Katt,
Bravo!
It is time for us to take OUR club back!
The recent election was a fraud – 14 people ran for nine open board positions – only 4 qualified.
The reason?
A new cayegory, “voting member” so that of 3,500 members only 600 were allowed to vote and even then the votes didn’t count!
It isn’t “our” club when 80% of are not allowed to vote!
Keep it up Katt!
I truly think that there is a lack of transparency with the BOG and the House Committee. It is very cliquish indeed. They do not make themselves available to members. Also, who appoints the Vice Presidents of the club? Whenever I vote, I am unable to NOT vote for them.
Is this group operating?
How do we contact, join, etc?
Given the recent news of a 3% “tax” for all non DD remittances including payment via CC, it occurred to me that TAC should be issuing its own CC, backed, of course, by a relevant institution under VISA branding or the like.
The CC doubles as a membership card. Points for TAC services can be earned. All monthly fees and dues are applied to the CC. The card issuer pays a small percentage of the outstanding monthly bill of each member to TAC in return for gaining access to the membership roll, thus providing useful income. The issue of non-payers is passed to the card issuing company. There may be a minimum number required to entice a card issuer to play. This shouldn’t entail consultants or committees. Does the club have a VISA or similar employee on the membership roll that can tell us if card issuers have these programs in place?
As ever I am fascinated at the mindset that prevails which is always “charge more”. Wouldn’t it be better to discount people for timely and full bill payment? I am very keen to support the club and its employees, but I resent being gouged.
Gary,
somebody from the Membership office will contact you shortly.
Dieter
My feedback is I would like someone from the membership committee to call me. I called and sent emails several months ago about re activating two club membership. Would really like a response by someone.
Gary Wigmore
Milbank
Gary Wigmore
+81 3 5410 2840 work
Would it be possible to post the TAC organization chart?
Without names in the interest of confidentiality (?).
It could just be me, but I don’t think the members have a clear idea who runs the club and how they are organized.
Every TAC officer and senior manager should have an official email box (e.g., President@tac.org) that is on a working server, has adequate capacity and is kept from overflowing by that TAC officer or staff.
Try responding to the President’s emails and you will find that his email inbox is overflowing and your email has been refused.
Staff use of email is spotty. Membership Services can be reached by email, but much of the TAC staff is still in the fax and telephone age. Most of the TAC membership is in the Blackberry age.
So much for communication with the membership.
Why can’t TAC save the expense of printing, folding, stuffing, transporting and mailing monthly invoices by offering an electronic billing option? This can be as simple as sending a PDF file by email instead of postal mail, or as elaborate as an online remittance system.
The current postal mailing system is inappropriate for an organization with a financial problem whose members travel frequently and are not at their postal mailbox for much of the year.
Does any member do business with a firm charges extra monthly fees in June and December to pay employees bonuses? Every firm I know about in Japan builds its yearly employee bonus overhead into prices for customers, rather than trying to charge more in bonus months.
The TAC system of charging extra dues seems to go back to the days when most TAC members had their dues paid for by companies that automatically paid the dues bills without much thought.
TAC could in fact generate funds by buiding bonus payments into its monthly invoices, but paying employees a bonus only twice a year, as it common throughout Japan. (No bonus is also increasingly common, and many workers are happy to have a job even with no bonus.)
Although, I know it is not about reduce costs for TAC. However, every year we pay extra dues for twice that year.
The letter included always says this is approved by the board of governors. I have two questions-
1) Are these bonuses going to the top 10 managers or the majority of the staff which are contract workers?
2) Who on the board is approving these bonuses?
I cannot charge my clients additional months of labor to pay bonuses. I would like to see this system terminated immediately.