Representatives from municipalities with a large number of foreign residents are calling for the central government to set up a new agency aimed at improving their livelihoods.
The proposal made Thursday by a group of 28 municipalities in seven prefectures said they have recognized the need for the government to create such an entity so that foreigners in Japan will be better off at a time of economic difficulties.
They also proposed that foreigners have the same rights and responsibilities as Japanese nationals and make it mandatory for children with foreign nationality to attend schools in Japan.
The proposal was handed to Democratic Party of Japan Vice Secretary General Goshi Hosono.
TozenAdmin
Number of temporary workers in Japan up 4.6% in fiscal 2008
Japan saw the number of temporary workers rise by 4.6 percent in fiscal 2008, a survey released by the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare showed on Thursday.
The number of workers now on temporary contracts stood at 3.99 million for fiscal 2008, in a country that was once known for companies that gave their staff jobs for life.
The survey compiled numbers from 66,424 businesses that declared their employment records to the government in the fiscal year that ended on March 31. In recent years, Japan has seen the number of temporary workers on its books increase, as the baby boomer generation begins to retire, and company workers are replaced by people hired from outside agencies.
In fiscal 2007, the nation saw the number of temporary workers increase by 18.7 percent.
Temporary workers are afforded less rights under the Japanese labor law, and can often be dismissed with very short notice and little compensation.
In the aftermath of the credit crisis that started in the United States last year, many temporary workers were left jobless with little money last winter.
The figures for 2008 showed that 2.81 million people were employed on short-term contracts with companies. The 1.18 million workers were in dispatched to companies on long-term contracts.
The governing Democratic Party of Japan said in its election manifesto this summer that it aims to improve the nation’s employment conditions, and “ban, in principle, the dispatch of temporary workers to manufacturing jobs.” The figures released Thursday showed that the number of temporary workers in manufacturing jobs had risen by 19.6 percent from the previous year to 560,000 people on June 1, 2008.
Critics of the temporary worker system have argued that the insecure nature of the jobs provides a great deal of benefits for large companies, but is on the whole detrimental to society.
In the last year, Japan has struggled to bounce back after suffering a downturn in the aftermath of the credit crisis, with weak employment and bad conditions for households preventing growth in the manufacturing sector from turning into a sustained recovery.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/26/content_12542627.htm
No. of immigrants applying for repatriation aid hit 16,000 by mid-Nov.
The number of immigrants of Japanese descent who had applied for government repatriation aid since the program began in April had reached roughly 16,000 by mid-November, welfare ministry officials said Monday.
http://home.kyodo.co.jp/modules/fstStory/index.php?storyid=472071
Attention ALTs!
If Interac tries to pressure you into signing up for Kokumin Kenko Hoken, don’t do it! Kokumin Kenko Hoken is for people that are self-employed or unemployed. If you sign up for Kokumin Kenko Hoken, you may be forced to back enroll into the system up to the time that you started working in Japan (meaning you will have to pay your monthly dues up to the maximum limit of two years).
Instead, you should enroll into Shakai Hoken, because Interac will be forced to pay their half. If there is any back enrollment it will be covered by the company, not by you. You are all eligible for this. The only reason Interac tells you otherwise is because they don’t want to pay their portion of the money.
You can do this on your own, or you can join the “Interac union” (aka members of the Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union Tozen ALTs) and we can force them to pay up together in solidarity. The Tokyo General Union has a lot of experience in forcing companies to enroll their employees into Shakai Hoken so we can get you enrolled with much less effort on you part.
Solidarity
Foreigner vote not reciprocal
The Democratic Party of Japan is likely to give local election voting rights to foreigners with permanent residence status and who are from countries or regions with diplomatic links or other ties to Japan, sources said Monday.
They include South Korea, which has diplomatic ties, and Taiwan, which lacks diplomatic links but has a strong working relationship with Japan, they said. The ruling party may submit the relevant bill in the current extraordinary Diet session, they said.
The bill will not take the so-called reciprocal approach of granting voting rights to long-term foreign residents on the basis of whether their countries confer similar privileges on Japanese citizens, they said.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200911110133.html
Bill eyed to give vote to foreigners
The Diet affairs chief of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan said Friday that DPJ lawmakers were planning to introduce a bill to grant foreign nationals with permanent resident status the right to vote in local elections.
Kenji Yamaoka also said the current extraordinary Diet session may have to be extended beyond its scheduled end on Nov. 30 because of the need to deliberate on this and 12 other bills.
DPJ Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa has pushed for giving voting rights to permanent residents of Japan, many of whom are Koreans.
The opposition New Komeito is also in favor of the move.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200911070139.html
DPJ exec eyes suffrage bill this term
The Democratic Party of Japan may submit a bill during the current extraordinary Diet session that would grant permanent foreign residents the right to vote in local-level elections, DPJ Diet affairs chief Kenji Yamaoka told reporters Friday, noting the session may also have to be extended.
His comments come a day after Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama indicated submitting such a bill anytime soon would be difficult, indicating next year would be the earliest proposed legislation would appear.
Speaking after attending a meeting with Liberal Democratic Party Diet affairs chief Jiro Kawasaki, Yamaoka said he told his opposition counterpart the bill may be submitted as lawmaker-sponsored legislation and asked for cooperation from the conservative LDP, which has been against foreigner suffrage.
“Considering the various opinions that exist within (the DPJ), depending on the circumstances we could ask lawmakers to vote on an individual basis,” Yamaoka said.
Yamaoka also said the Diet session may have to be extended from its current Nov. 30 deadline to allow enough time to deliberate various legislation and treaties.
Hatoyama has been playing down the prospects for drafting the foreigner suffrage bill, saying a consensus has not been reached within the ruling coalition, let alone the general public, over the issue.
An open letter to Interac concerning health insurance
An open letter to the management of Interac (as well as Maxceed and Selnate)
November 5th, 2009
To whom it may concern (including Kevin Salthouse and Denis Cusack),
I am an executive of the ALT branch of Tokyo Nambu’s Foreign Workers Caucus. I worked for Interac from September of 2005 until February 2008, under the Osaka branch.
I am writing to clear up some misconceptions about health insurance in Japan that were evident in a couple of PDFs that were circulated from management at the beginning of October 2009.
The two PDFs in question are the “FAQ – Insurance System in Japan” and the one titled “Social Insurance Letter” dated October 1st, 2009. In these PDFs, you tell your ALTs that they are not eligible for Shakai Hoken if they work less than 29.5 hours.
This is not true.
You also tell them that the only alternative is to sign up for Kokumin Kenko Hoken and that they may have to pay up to two years of back enrollment.
The problem is that, since they are eligible for Shakai Hoken, it is the company that will have to pay the back enrollment (up to two years) into Shakai Hoken, after which the employee can be billed for their half of enrollment fees.
Let me give you some background information on how I know this.
Immigration showing signs of ninjo
[The recently released Harrison Ford film] “Crossing Over” is made up of a series of small but interconnected human dramas. It focuses on what the Japanese call ninj?, meaning “heart” or “humanity.” This is clear from the accompanying Japanese pamphlet, which proclaims, “Even (immigration) inspectors have ninj?.”
In recent years, this “foreign crime” (gaikokujin hanzai) discourse has become so widely promulgated by the media that it has come to drive policy, specifically the targeting of foreigners by the police and immigration inspectors. Thus, 2003 saw the implementation of a five-year plan to half the number of illegals known as the Kyodo Sengen. The resulting increase in arrests can be used as “proof” that non-Japanese are more likely to commit crime: In this way, the image, to some extent, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Recent changes to the Immigration Control and Refugee Law — to be implemented within the next three years — give little hope that the system will become less bureaucratic and more human. While there are some provisions — such as permit-free re-entry — that will make life easier for legal residents, failure to report a change of address or other personal details within three months will lead to revocation of residence status. For “illegal” residents, the revisions, which at root are about increased central government scrutiny and monitoring of non-Japanese, will inevitably result in more deportations.
There are some signs [Japan’s bureaucratic immigration system] might be changing. One sign of bureaucratic softening relates to naturalization, which in recent years has become a much more straightforward process. In 2008, for example, 15,440 applied for Japanese citizenship and 13,218 were accepted. These figures would inevitably increase if Japan were to recognize dual nationality; many permanent residents, this author included, would welcome the opportunity to contribute more fully to Japanese society if they didn’t first have to give up their original citizenship. Given Japan’s growing need for jinzai (human resources) in order to remain internationally competitive, it is no surprise that more and more politicians are calling for the Nationality Law to be revised.
In 2004, the justice minister announced a more flexible and “humanitarian” stance toward over-stayers. Specifically, the minister said he would apply more discretion in granting special resident status (zairyutokubetsukyoka) in cases where deportation would result in hardships, such as the breakup of families. The Immigration Bureau’s home page explains how “worried illegal migrants” who appear at their local immigration office and fill out the relevant forms (shutto shinkoku) will be allowed to “go home” without first being detained and may even, in special circumstances, be given leave to remain in Japan (see http://www.moj.go.jp/NYUKAN/nyukan87.html ).
2010 bill eyed to give foreigners local-level vote
The government might draft legislation next year to give permanent foreign residents the right to vote in local-level elections, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said Thursday.
“We are not yet in a situation where a bill has been prepared, and therefore it would be fairly difficult in the next Diet session,” Hatoyama told reporters Thursday, referring to the extraordinary session slated to open Monday. But submitting such a bill could be “an issue in the near future,” he said.
Permanent foreign residents, including ethnic Koreans who have grown roots here since the war, aren’t allowed to vote in local elections, much less national ones, despite lobbying for the right on the grounds that they pay taxes just like Japanese.
Kokumin Shinto (People’s New Party), one of the DPJ’s two junior coalition partners, has opposed giving foreign residents voting rights in local elections.