TozenAdmin To better protect temporary workers, staffing firms should be banned from dispatching registered workers for day work or employment periods of 30 days or less, a subcommittee of the Labor Policy Council advised the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry on Wednesday.
The panel also said the government should be allowed to recommend companies to directly employ temporary workers sent from staffing agencies if these companies are held responsible for illegal treatment of the workers.
The hope was provided by a group of lawmakers from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who drafted a bold proposal to create a new immigration policy that would raise the population of foreigners in Japan to 10 percent of the overall population in the next 50 years.
The proposal was handed to Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, but his sudden resignation announcement Sept. 1 is raising concerns the proposal will be buried by the next prime minister.
“I am disappointed,” said lawmaker Hirohiko Nakamura, who helped draft the proposal. In a recent interview with The Japan Times, Nakamura said Fukuda was instrumental in getting the proposal off the ground.
“We got this far because it was Fukuda. . . . Fukuda was willing to listen to the proposal and it was about to move forward.”
Japan’s immigration policy largely depends on its leader, but when the prime minister keeps changing, consistency goes out the window.
The group’s report is titled “Proposal For a Japanese-style Immigration Policy.” It aims to address the problem of Japan’s shrinking population by raising the number of foreign residents. Nakamura was secretary general of team, which was was chaired by former LDP Secretary General Hidenao Nakagawa.
“The only effective treatment to save Japan from a population crisis is to accept people from abroad,” the proposal says. “For Japan to survive, it needs to open its doors as an international state passable to the world and shift toward establishing an ‘immigrant nation’ by accepting immigrants and revitalizing Japan.”
The group’s definition of “immigrant” is consistent with that of the United Nations: individuals who have lived outside their home countries for more than 12 months. This includes people on state or corporate training programs, exchange students and asylum seekers.
One major aspect of the proposal, Nakamura explained, is protecting the rights of foreigners in Japan so they can work safely and securely.
“Japanese people are pretending not to see the human rights situation of foreign laborers,” Nakamura said. “In a world where even animal rights are protected, how can we ignore the human rights of foreign workers?”
“What are politicians doing to solve this problem?” Nakamura asked. “They are at the beck and call of the bureaucrats who are just trying to protect their vested interests.”
Nakamura faulted the bureaucrats for not creating a warmer society for foreigners. For example, they don’t bring up the poor labor conditions for foreign workers, but when a foreigner is suspected of a crime, the information is spread immediately, Nakamura said.
“Bureaucrats don’t want (many foreigners in Japan),” Nakamura said. “Otherwise, it would be so easy (for bureaucrats) to start an educational campaign on living symbiotically with foreigners.”
Admitting that lawmakers have also dragged their feet, Nakamura said the key to breaking the vertically structured bureaucrat-led administration is to establish an official “immigration agency” to unify the handling of foreigner-related affairs, including legal issues related to nationality and immigration control.
Back in March of 2007, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare reported that the number of foreigners working at Japanese firms had hit a record high of 222,929 at the end of May 2006. Looking at the growth in figures at the time, it seemed reasonable to assume that the number of foreigners working at Japanese companies would hit the 250,00 mark sometime in mid-2008.
However, according to a report released by the ministry last week, the number of foreigners working at Japanese companies as of June 30, 2008 has hit 338,813. This is obviously a massive increase on what was seen in 2006, and MHLW has an explanation for that. The survey method itself has changed a bit, as the Japanese government now requires all firms with foreign employees to report their name, nationality and visa status to the ministry whenever a hiring or dismissal takes place.
We will most likely see a further boost in these numbers, as compliance with the new rules does not take total effect until October 1. At any rate, the figure show that 44.2% of foreign workers at Japanese firms are from China (149,876), 20.9% are from Brazil (70,809), 12.4% are listed as ?other? (42,046), 8.3% are from the Philippines (28,134), 7.1% are from the G8 plus Australia and New Zealand (24,210), and 3.9% are from Korea (13,106). In the case of Korea, ?? is the kanji used, which implies that special permanent residents are excluded from this survey. Finally, 3.1% of the workers hail from Peru (10,632).
Of the 338,813 foreign workers in Japan, 120,601, or 35.6%, are listed as being heads of household who hold contract worker or temporary worker status.
SIA worker admits having firms low-ball required premium levels
The scandal-hit Social Insurance Agency admitted Tuesday that a staff member had instructed companies falling short on premiums for the government-run pension program to falsely claim their employees’ monthly incomes were lower so the firms could pay less.
Corporate subscribers to the pension scheme must pay premiums equal to about 15 percent of their workers’ monthly incomes. Half of the premiums are put up by the firms and the remainder by the employees.
If a company reports its employees’ monthly incomes ? the benchmark to calculate premiums ? are lower than their actual incomes or the employees’ subscription periods are reported to be shorter than they really are, the firm’s premium burden is reduced.
The practice benefits both employers and the agency. The SIA can achieve a better record on premium-payment rates by member firms if their payment burdens are reduced.
Pension account holders whose entries are found to have undergone suspicious changes in income levels will be notified, according to the agency.
Over 80 percent of managers at convenience stores and chain restaurants that had labor problems in the past are forced to work long hours without corresponding overtime pay, a government survey has found.
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which conducted the survey, has issued a warning to convenience stores and chain restaurants to correct the working conditions of their store managers.
The ministry’s warning issued on Tuesday indicated that anyone working under the following conditions should not be deemed as managers: Those not having the authority to employ part-time workers; those paid less than the minimum wage in terms of hourly wages; and those who cannot order their subordinates to work overtime.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20080910p2a00m0na006000c.html
The labor ministry on Tuesday signaled its intention to scrutinize companies that appoint workers as store managers to avoid paying overtime, while giving them little or no managerial authority.
The practice is especially widespread in the restaurant and retail sectors where many so-called managers are required to work long hours.
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare issued a notice to regional labor bureaus that includes specific standards to determine if “managers” of restaurants and retail outlets are actually managing.
Yoichi Masuzoe, the labor minister, said Tuesday: “Forcing an individual to work long hours at low pay is unacceptable. We will proceed with further improvements.”
The last time the labor ministry issued a notice defining standards for managers in a specific industry was 1977 when it targeted the banking industry.
The topic of store managers in name-only attracted national attention in January when the Tokyo District Court ordered McDonald’s Co. (Japan) to pay a store manager overtime pay because he had no actual management authority.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200809090336.html
According to the questionnaire conducted in Japan as well as in eight countries in Europe and North America, the Japanese only took an annual average of eight paid holidays — smaller than any other country questioned. France topped the list with 34 days, followed by Italy and Spain with 27 paid days off annually.
Among the reasons why Japanese employees can’t take paid holidays were, “Too busy with work” and “Their bosses and colleagues have yet to take their paid leave,” the survey found. When asked what countermeasures should be introduced to deal with the problem, most people said, “Managers should encourage workers to take more paid holidays.” The survey has underscored the importance of creating an environment that makes it easy for employees to take paid leave.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20080903p2a00m0na006000c.html
Hard times have forced a new underclass to move into three-square-metre rooms ? with internet access, writes Justin Norrie in Tokyo.
Hidefumi Ito smiles widely when he recalls the sprawling five-bedroom house he built for his family in Hakodate, in the north of Japan.
These days the 53-year-old divorcee’s lodgings are somewhat smaller. As he huddles cross-legged behind a computer screen, Ito surveys his rented three-square-metre “Net room” in Tokyo’s old town and wonders how he lost it all: the art gallery business he declared bankrupt, the wife and children who no longer talk to him, the sense of belonging to regular working society.
Crammed into his new living space, on the second floor of a drab, four-storey building in Shin-okachimachi, is a computer with high-speed internet access, a tiny sink, a few bags of his clothes, a copy of Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka On The Shore and a CD of jazz recordings by female singers.
For 1500 yen a day, the temporary shift worker – currently employed to lift and sort parcels for a delivery service – can enjoy his own “hiding place from the world” in Japan’s cheapest accommodation, introduced a year ago to house those unable to afford a permanent home.
As morning arrives through the window, Ito stretches out across the full length of the tatami mat flooring, drapes a bath towel over himself and sleeps.
Such is life for one of the older members of Japan’s “working poor”. In the west the expression has been commonplace for decades but in Japan the borrowed English words make up the newest catch cry of the nation’s media.. Over the past year newspapers and TV networks have become preoccupied with the vast generation of haken (part-time) working poor scratching out a minimal income and living in Net rooms, internet cafes and other makeshift accommodation.
The new underclass, estimated by some to make up almost one-quarter of the working population, emerged seven years ago under then prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose free-market reforms encouraged Japanese companies that once guaranteed lifetime employment to start recruiting temporary staff instead. Since then the proportion of Japan’s workforce defined as part-time workers has climbed from 38 per cent to 44 per cent, according to government figures. A Health Ministry survey last year estimated that 5400 unemployed and part-time workers, many of them in their 20s, were sleeping for at least half of the week in internet cafes because they could not afford permanent homes.
Some, like Shigekazu Kinjo, a construction worker in his early 30s currently staying at an internet cafe near Shinjuku station, have been doing so for several years. “I accumulated a big debt on an apartment I was living in and eventually I was evicted,” he says. “This is a much cheaper, but a much lonelier, way to live.” Because they have no fixed address, internet cafe refugees such as Kinjo are forced to search for day-to-day work – usually manual labour – that in turn renders them ineligible for better jobs.
Lawyer Mami Nakano, an expert on labour regulations says that the “sad reality” for many is that it’s “impossible to climb out of this situation. There’s no hope. Most Japanese know about internet cafe refugees but they simply don’t understand how horrible and hopeless the living conditions are. A whole subclass of people in their 20s and 30s has become trapped.”
Unlike younger workers caught in Japan’s poverty cycle, Ito has forsaken tiny internet cafe cubicles, 24-hour fast food restaurant booths and all-night saunas for the relative luxury of the Net room, designed and built last August by Tsukasa Downtown Development Company.
“I lived in internet cafes for half a month, but I could never get any sleep,” he says. “It was too noisy. Here I can lie down and get some proper sleep. It’s incomparably better.”
Sachihiko Kawamata, the 60-year-old president of Tsukasa and originator of the Net room, says he was motivated by the plight of one man: “Three years ago there was a gentleman in his 40s from Hokkaido who came to Tokyo looking for work. He rented one of our cheap office spaces and slept on the floor. After a week or two he couldn’t find any jobs, he ran out of money and he became desperate. Finally he threw himself off a nearby building. That affected me deeply.”
Last year, as “internet cafe refugees” became a cause celebre in the local media, Kawamata decided to put his plan into action. So far he has fitted out 50 Net rooms in 15 blocks across Tokyo. He plans to build another 150. The 2000 tiny office spaces he rents out by the day are also used as temporary dwellings, although occupants are supposedly not meant to sleep in them. “Ever since I was a teenager in the US, when I was always struggling to find a place to spend the night, I felt a very strong sympathy for people with nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep.”
Until now the Japanese Government has expressed grave concern about the expanding ranks of working poor but taken little practical action to offer them financial security. New laws adopted last May have forced employers to offer equal pay and training to part-timers performing tasks equivalent to those of regular workers. But the changes have affected less than 5 per cent of part-time workers.
Ito is bitter at what he perceives to be a half-hearted government response: “They don’t seem to have any real plan at all for people like me. It’s all very superficial stuff. Essentially we’ve been forgotten.” Yamato Unyu, the delivery company that employs him to lift and sort parcels, pays him 15,000 yen a night. But because his two-month contract finishes at the end of this month, and because he has no idea where his next job will come from, he cannot afford to rent a studio apartment. “I can never plan my life very far ahead,” Ito says. “For now I’m happy here.”
This year the Net rooms have been filled almost to capacity. That, says Kawamata, is evidence of the growing divide between rich and poor in Japan, once a fabulously wealthy country where entrenched poverty was not common.
Statistics provided by TV Asahi showed that in the Bubble years of the 1980s the top 20 per cent of the population made 10 times more than the bottom 20 per cent. By 2000, they were making 168 times more.
In response, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s cabinet recently announced it would introduce job-training loans next year to help part-timers make the transition to permanent work. It has also proposed to ban businesses from offering contracts of less than one month.
“It won’t make any difference,” says lawyer Nakano, “because the entire part-time work system is designed to facilitate human rights abuses by business. Until the government stops companies from hiring people on all short-term contracts – two months, six months, whatever – part-time workers will be completely unable to secure their livelihood.”
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/no-hiding-place-for-homeless/2008/08/29/1219516735792.html
In a new report to the United Nations, the government outlines the situation of ethnic minorities and foreign residents in Japan, claiming it has made “every conceivable” effort over the past several years to eliminate racial discrimination.
Occasionally sounding on the defensive, the report, released Friday, sidesteps the issue of a comprehensive law prohibiting discrimination between individuals.
Human rights groups and Doudou Diene, the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, have called for the passage of a law clearly against racism and xenophobia, as well as the establishment of an independent national human rights monitoring body.
Masahiko Tanabe’s life has changed since Japanese homeware retailer The Loft Co. made him a permanent employee and gave him a 10 percent raise. “This is kind of a luxury to me,” said the former temporary shop assistant. “I used to buy fish for dinner; now I buy meat.”
As aging employees retire, Japan’s labor market is shrinking, so companies are giving contract workers permanent status to retain staff. This reverses a trend that began in the early 1990s when a stagnating economy prompted businesses to hire more temporary employees and shed permanent jobs, many of which were considered lifetime positions.
“The era of companies just adding temporary workers is probably over,” said Kotaro Tsuru, a senior fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo and a director of policy planning in the government’s Cabinet Office. “Full-timers are crucial for companies to increase productivity, accumulate knowledge and develop human resources to expand.”
The shift helped average monthly wages climb 18,700 yen, or 0.9 percent, to 311,400 yen ($2,850) in the first half of 2008 from the same period last year, providing some relief to households facing the fastest inflation in a decade. Better pay and job security may encourage consumers to spend more, supporting an economy that shrank an annualized 2.4 percent in the second quarter.
Easing the Pain
Permanent hiring is “easing the pain that rising food and gasoline prices are inflicting,” said Hiromichi Shirakawa, chief economist at Credit Suisse Group in Tokyo. Japan’s core inflation rate, which excludes fruit, fish and vegetables, accelerated to 1.9 percent in June from a year earlier, the highest since 1998.
The change in employment is occurring even as Japan slides toward its first recession since 2001-2002. That’s partly because demand for labor is close to the highest level in 16 years, according to a Bank of Japan index.
One reason is demographics: Japan is the first developed nation to register more annual deaths than births; and by 2030, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates its workforce will shrink 20 percent to 67 million. In 2050, 40 percent of Japan’s population will be older than 65, doubling from 2005, the Tokyo-based institute predicts.
All this is prompting companies to begin unwinding a practice that increased the proportion of part-time and temporary workers to one in three last year from one in five a decade earlier.
`No Other Way’
“There was no other way we could have that many shop staff gain the product knowledge needed to satisfy our customers,” said Nobuyuki Shinoda, managing director at The Loft. The Tokyo-based retailer of cosmetics, stationery and toys gave permanent contracts to all its 2,330 temporary workers, including Tanabe, in April.
The company has a total of 3,400 employees, and turnover has halved since the change, Shinoda said. Previously, 80 percent of The Loft’s temporary workers quit each year.
The number of Japan’s full-time employees rose at the fastest pace in 15 years in February, outstripping the increase in part-timers for the first time since 2006, Labor Ministry data show. Permanent workers averaged 2,430 yen an hour in the year ended March 2008, more than twice the 1,020 yen received by part-time and temporary staff, who typically aren’t eligible for bonuses or company health insurance and pensions.
Korean Barbecue
Tanabe, 45, said his pay raise allowed him to buy a 30,000 yen mobile phone and dine at Korean barbecue restaurants.
The trend “is definitely durable as the population is going to keep getting older,” said Glenn Maguire, chief Asia- Pacific economist at Societe Generale in Hong Kong. “This could potentially become more pronounced in 2009 and 2010.”
The country’s 7 million so-called baby boomers — people born from 1947 until abortion became legal in 1949 — began retiring last year, giving companies “room to transfer younger people from part-time to full-time,” said Robert Feldman, head of economic research at Morgan Stanley in Tokyo.
The government is pushing companies to hire permanent staff because of concerns that part-timers may be forced into poverty when they get sick or retire. The Labor Ministry implemented rules in April that urge businesses to give equal pay and benefits to temporary employees who perform the same work as full-timers. The regulations don’t force companies to comply.
New Rules
Shidax Corp., a Tokyo-based caterer and karaoke operator, made 500 of its 30,000 employees permanent when the new rules took effect.
“Even without the law change, we really needed to reduce the waste of spending on training new employees, as half of them quit within a year,” said Akira Imamura, who works in the company’s personnel department.
Some employers may find it difficult to pay workers more when their profits are being squeezed by record materials prices. Japan’s largest businesses expect earnings will fall for the first time in seven years for the year ending March 2009, the nation’s central bank said July 1.
Still, Shidax is considering adding more full-time staff. “We have to increase the knowledge and productivity of our employees, even if it raises our costs in the short term,” Imamura said. “This is just the first step.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=a4JYSXJgkh0Y&refer=japan