TozenAdmin

Japan to start grading skilled foreign workers in spring

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The government announced Wednesday that it will start grading skilled foreign workers this spring and granting those with higher marks preferential treatment amid intensifying international competition for human resources.

Justice Minister Hideo Hiraoka told a press conference that he hopes an increase in foreign workers with high-level skills will help to complement Japan’s workforce.

Under the new system, the government will classify professions into three categories — academic research, work requiring highly specialized skills, and management and administration.

It will award up to 30 points to people with doctoral or masters degrees, and up to 25 points to specialists based on the length of their working experience.

Those who obtain 70 points will receive preferential treatment, such as securing a permanent visa if they reside in Japan for around five years in principle, shorter than the current 10 years, and their spouses will also be allowed to work in Japan, the ministry said.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111228p2g00m0dm068000c.html

Immigration changes to come as new law takes effect in July

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The revised immigration law will take effect next July 9 and the government will start accepting applications for new residence registration cards on Jan. 13, the Cabinet decided Tuesday, paving the way for increased government scrutiny through a centralized immigration control of foreign nationals.

The current alien registration cards, overseen by local municipalities, will be replaced with the cards issued by the central government.

According to the Justice Ministry, foreign residents can apply for the new card at their nearest regional immigration office beginning Jan. 13 but won’t receive it until July. However, valid alien registration certificates will be acceptable until the cardholder’s next application for a visa extension takes place.

At that point, the old card will be replaced with the new residence card, which will have a special embedded IC chip to prevent counterfeiting.

The government claims that centralized management of data on foreign residents will allow easier access to all personal information of the cardholder, such as type of visa, home address and work address, and in return enable officials to more conveniently provide services for legal aliens.

For example, documented foreigners will have their maximum period of stay extended to five years instead of the current three years. Re-entry to Japan will also be allowed without applying for a permit as long as the time away is less than a year, according to the Justice Ministry.

Permanent residents, meanwhile, will have to apply for a new residence card within three years from July 2012. Required materials necessary for an application have not been determined yet.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20111221a5.html

Four years after ‘Nova shock,’ eikaiwa is down but not out

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Ask any ordinary person what significance Oct. 26 holds and you might find them struggling for an answer, but for many involved in Japan’s beleaguered English teaching industry, it was the day the nation’s premier operator fell into administration and took much of the rest of the industry with it.

This year, Nova marked its fourth anniversary of operation following restructuring, and while Louis Carlet, executive president of Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union (Tozen), admits it has been a long time since the collapse, he feels that the English conversation school (eikaiwa) industry as a whole “continues to convulse.”

Carlet is no stranger to the Nova saga, having been a spectator to it from the start of the chain’s public troubles in early 2007 and the eventual bankruptcy to Nova’s restructuring by Nagoya-based holding company G.Communication in the following years.

Although the media at the time asked Carlet for his thoughts on a seemingly daily basis, he admits it was difficult to get a historical perspective on what impact Nova’s collapse would have on the industry.

“One thing I did say during several press conferences was that the business model of profits over people does not work in the long run,” he says.

Once the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry became involved in investigating Nova’s business in 2007, the eikaiwa chain seemingly went from a fully operating business to bankruptcy within months.

During the course of Nova’s downward spiral, the atmosphere at branches took a slightly unusual turn as Nova management, or more specifically then President Nozomu Sahashi, tried to allay instructors’ concerns about delayed payments through bizarrely worded faxes, which instead seemed to have the opposite effect.

Thinking back to those faxes, often referred to as “Jesus memos” for the spiritual metaphors and starry-eyed rhetoric Sahashi utilized, Carlet describes them as “creepy” and says they gave employees the feeling Sahashi “was losing it,” which only further lowered the confidence of everyone involved.

Nova finally collapsed under the weight of its debt on Oct. 26, 2007, though while many knew it was coming, Carlet admits he was surprised to hear that the Nova board had conducted a coup d’etat by holding an emergency meeting without Sahashi in order to fire him and immediately apply for court protection from creditors.

Immediately after, the National General Workers Union (NGWU) [sic] found itself thrust into the difficult position of providing support and advice to Nova’s entire foreign workforce, in addition to dealing with a surge in membership in the hundreds.

The labor group managed to organize the instructors into rallies and visits to the Labor Standards Office, as well as holding seminars to explain the complicated system behind the government’s guarantee that 80 percent of unpaid wages would be repaid in the event of bankruptcy and how to apply for unemployment benefits.

“We did a public relations campaign to make sure everyone in Japan knew how bad it was for unpaid teachers, some of whom had trouble getting food,” explains Carlet, who was then deputy secretary general of NGWU’s Tokyo Nambu branch.

The NGWU attempted to assist instructors in this predicament with a highly publicized “Lesson for Food” program, where private students would compensate an instructor for an impromptu language lesson with a meal instead of the normal tuition fee.

While the union’s intentions behind the initiative were noble, Carlet admits in hindsight that it had the “unintended consequence of lowering the private lesson market rate.”

One senior instructor in western Japan, who chose to remain anonymous for this story, has worked continuously with Nova since years before its restructuring, and witnessed the scaling down of Nova firsthand.

“The old Nova had a hierarchy of supervisors who conducted training and evaluations, called titled instructors, and gave day-to-day feedback on teaching performance,” he explains. “They did not always do the job very well, but as G.education hired so few people, there hardly ever seem to be any lesson observations anymore.”

The instructor describes the current Nova management as “extremely poor,” and while it was not especially good at the old Nova, he feels that the people running the branches now are “much worse.”

“There needs to be a proper system for training and supervising teachers, and while the various companies running Nova want the teachers to get more involved in sales, they have no good ideas about what they want the teachers to do,” he says.

While Nova has managed to pull off the massive feat of restructuring, it is clear that the eikaiwa industry has suffered significant contraction following the collapse, with competing language chain Geos going bankrupt in the middle of 2010.

“The economy is bad and young people’s employment is so unstable that most people have little extra time or money to spend learning a foreign language,” Carlet explains.

Looking to the future, Carlet does not foresee things improving drastically for the eikaiwa industry as a whole, but sees some opportunity for smaller operations.

“To recover, the eikaiwa industry would have to overhaul its business model and take language learning seriously as an educational exercise, treat teachers as long-time careerists and, ultimately, charge more,” he says.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20111220zg.html

Govt to limit 2nd-graders to 35 per class next year

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The government plans to limit the number of second-year students at public primary schools to 35 per class starting in the 2012 academic year, sources said Saturday.

The system was introduced for first-year students at public primary schools in the 2011 school year.

To realize the plan, the government plans to employ about 1,000 more teachers, appropriating the necessary outlay in the fiscal 2012 budget, without revising the current law.

The education and finance ministries have concluded that the government will not face a heavy fiscal burden if the number of teachers can be increased without revising the relevant laws.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T111217003275.htm

Young teacher’s 2004 self-immolation caused by job stress, court rules

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On-the-job stress is what pushed an elementary school teacher here to commit suicide in 2004, the Shizuoka District Court ruled on Dec. 15.

Siding with plaintiff Kenji Kimura, 62 — father of teacher Yuriko Kimura, who was 24 at the time of her death — the court ruled against the Fund for Local Government Employees’ Accident Compensation, which had refused to recognize the suicide as a “job accident.”

According to the decision handed down by Presiding Judge Tsutomu Yamazaki, when Yuriko Kimura was hired in April 2004 and put in charge of an unruly class of fourth graders, she was “exposed to continued extreme stress and did not receive appropriate support,” causing her to develop symptoms of depression. Furthermore, “the students’ problematic behavior continued to occur frequently, and disrupted classes became the norm.” The court ruled that the severe depression caused by these circumstances led to her self-immolation later that year after receiving a written complaint from a parent.

The accident compensation fund argued that Kimura had abandoned class discipline and let the students run wild, and otherwise demonstrated a lack of social skills, claiming her subsequent depression was partly her own fault.

The court ruling also stated that the teachers and school administrators who criticized Kimura for poor teaching should have been more supportive, saying the lack of that support was “a very large problem.”

At a press conference after the trial, Kenji Kimura told reporters, “I want a thorough check on what’s going on at the school and measures to be put in place so this doesn’t happen again.”

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111216p2a00m0na003000c.html

Average winter bonus for gov’t employees goes up 4.1%

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The government’s rank-and-file employees received on average of about 617,100 yen in winter bonuses, up 4.1 percent from a year earlier, as the Democratic Party of Japan-led government failed to make deep cuts in wages.

The average bonus for a government employee is equivalent to 2.02 months pay, which is some 1,900 yen higher than if a 0.23 percent pay cut had been implemented. The authority’s proposal is designed to make up for the gap with pay from the private sector.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111209p2g00m0dm024000c.html

Nurses in Japan find language a barrier

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“It’s like taking a nursing course all over again, but this time, in Japanese.”

That is what Filipino nurses here told Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz when they met on Sunday and asked the labor chief for help in hurdling the national nursing board exams of Japan.

Baldoz said she met with six nurses and five caregivers who came here under the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (Jpepa), and they asked for help because the board exams were in Japanese and “were really very difficult.”

“They asked for assistance in their review and suggested that we negotiate (with the Japanese) to find ways to make the exams easier. They said the exams were really very difficult,” Baldoz said in an interview.

“They said it was like studying again, but this time using the Japanese language,” she added.

Baldoz is in Japan to attend the International Labor Organization’s 15th Asia and the Pacific Regional Meeting (APRM), which will discuss jobs protection and economic growth amid the global financial crisis.

Baldoz said the government would raise the issue when Japan and the Philippines review the Jpepa next month.

“That’s one area we will take up in January when we have the negotiations in Manila. We will be looking into areas for improvement and that is one of the things we will check,” Baldoz said.

“The Philippine embassy here will also send some communication and I will have all of this reviewed,” she added.

Baldoz said there was already an initiative to translate the most recent Japanese board exams into English so that this could serve as a reviewer for the Filipino nurses.

“They really need this because they find the exams difficult since it’s in Japanese. They can’t understand it. You have to study Japanese for a long time to be adept at using it,” she said.

Sent back to Philippines

Under Jpepa, 1,000 Filipino nurses and caregivers are supposed to be sent to Japan to help care for its aging population. The nurses are given three years to study for their exams while working as “nursing trainees.” Those who fail are sent back to the Philippines.

As of May 2011—or nearly five years after the Jpepa was signed and nearly three years after it was ratified by the Philippine Senate—only two Filipino nurses have passed the licensure exam for nursing while 229 caregivers have been allowed to work here.

“When it comes to (the) salaries (of the nursing trainees), there is no problem. They say they still get a net of P40,000. It depends on the institutions but some of them also get free lodging and food,” Baldoz said.

She said the nurses and caregivers she met were mostly from Cotabato, Zamboanga and Bohol. The rest were from Luzon.

http://globalnation.inquirer.net/20297/nurses-in-japan-find-language-a-barrier

Labor ministry proposes requiring firms to hire employees till age 65

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The labor ministry proposed Wednesday requiring companies to keep their workers employed till the age of 65 if they wish to continue working even after reaching the retirement age of 60, in light of the government’s plan to raise the pensionable age from 60 to 65 in stages.

It is uncertain, however, if the bill would be enacted as expected, as employers are opposed to making continued employment obligatory.

Under the current law, companies are obliged to keep their workers employed until they reach 65, but the law also allows firms to select which workers to employ based on various criteria including their ability.

The ministry also said raising the retirement age itself to 65 would be “a mid- to long-term agenda.”

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111215p2g00m0dm024000c.html

Occupy Wall Street resonates within Japan

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Author Karin Amamiya gives her views on the OWS movement in the monthly media magazine Tsukuru (December) and finds many similarities between Japan and the U.S. As opposed to a U.S. poverty rate of 15.1 percent, Japan’s is over 16 percent. The number of welfare recipients in Japan has shot past 2 million, and percentage of those in the work force holding nonregular jobs is at its highest level ever — 38.7 percent.

Last Thursday, a five-page article in Shukan Bunshun (Dec. 8) gave one of the gloomiest indications yet that the prolonged recession has had a pronounced effect on the incomes of Japan’s wage earners.

According to business consultant Masao Kitami, during 1997-2007, total wages declined by ¥20 trillion. “When people say Japan is becoming a society with a widening income gap,” he writes, “I tell them, we’ve descended into a ‘low-wage society.'”

Based on surveys of major corporations belonging to Keidanren (the Japan Business Federation), Kitami provides the latest data showing significant drops in wages between 2007-2010. The declines in the greater Tokyo region — where workers typically receive the highest remuneration in Japan — have been particularly steep. For males in their 50s, for example, the mean annual compensation dropped from ¥5.58 million in 2007 to ¥4.81 million in 2010. After withholdings, monthly take-home pay by younger salaried workers may be less than ¥200,000.

Kitami warns that once the annual incomes of males in their 50s living in Japan’s three main urban areas plummets below ¥5 million, the current social welfare model, based on a nuclear family composed of husband, wife and two children, is in danger of collapse.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fd20111204bj.html

All employees in Japan are entitled to paid leave, period

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Reader A is employed by an agency and has been dispatched to a food processing company. The agency explained to A that she was not entitled to paid leave. However, other people directly employed by the food processing company enjoy 10 to 15 days paid holiday, and A has recently learned that those dispatched by other agencies to the same company also get paid leave.

In justifying the decision not to grant A paid leave, the agency said that A’s work schedule is irregular depending on the company calendar. However, A says she is working the night shift eight hours a day, 40 hours a week at least.

A, I assume that you have been dispatched legally, that is, based on the Act for Securing the Proper Operation of Worker Dispatching Undertakings and Improved Working Conditions for Dispatched Workers. Under this act, “worker dispatching” is defined as “causing a worker(s) employed by one person so as to be engaged in work for another person under the instruction of the latter, while maintaining his/her employment relationship with the former, but excluding cases where the former agrees with the latter that such worker(s) shall be employed by the latter” (Article 2). If this is the case, you have an employment relationship not with the company where you are dispatched (hakensaki) but with the agency that dispatches you (hakenmoto).

Paid leave is a right all employees are entitled to. A worker who has been employed continuously for six months from the day they were hired and has reported for work on at least 80 percent of their assigned workdays must be granted annual paid leave, according to Article 39 of the Labor Standards Act.

If you fulfill the conditions for paid leave, you have a legal right to demand it from your agency. If the agency still refuses, you should report them to the relevant labor standards bureau, who will conduct an investigation and either suggest or request the agency grant you paid leave if a violation is found.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20111213ll.html