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Japan’s Shrinking Workforce Spurs Shift to Full-Time Employees

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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

Japanese discontent voiced in novel sales

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“We?re going to hell!,” shouts a Japanese fisherman as he boards a factory ship bound for freezing waters off Russia.

The sailor and his comrades ? a mix of sea-hardened veterans, university students and poor farm boys ? are beaten and exploited by sadistic foremen and greedy bosses. When they form a union and strike, the army stomps aboard and brutally puts it down.

Such is the bare-bones plot of the proletarian classic The Crab Ship, a novel that earned its author Takiji Kobayashi the attentions of Japan?s infamous special police, who tortured him to death four years after it was published. But that was 1933, and to the astonishment of many, except perhaps Japan?s growing army of working poor, Kobayashi?s book is back in fashion, outselling most other titles on the shelves.

After years ticking along on annual sales of about 5,000, mainly to college professors and socialists, The Crab Ship exploded in popularity from January. Shinchosha, publisher of a pocket version of the book, has run off nearly 490,000 copies this year, a 100-fold increase, and says there is no end to the print run in sight. “It?s caught us by surprise,” admits a company spokesman, Yuki Mine, who says over half of new readers are in their twenties and thirties. A comic version, published in 2006, has proved hugely popular with students.

The resurrection of a Marxist tome many had long consigned to the dustbin of Japan?s poverty-stricken past is seen as evidence of growing discontent in the world?s second-largest economy, which has shed many employee protections in a decade of profound restructuring. More than one-third of Japan?s workforce is part-time and millions more, especially the young, are learning how to live on shrinking wages and diminished expectations.

“Circumstances in the novel are different but the structure of society is the same,” says Karin Amamiya, a writer and critic, who helped spark the book?s revival when she praised its prescience during a January interview in The Mainichi newspaper. “Readers nowadays see themselves in the book. Especially poor young people see their own lives described.”

Publishers are not the only ones to have benefitted from the changing national mood. The tiny Japan Communist Party (JCP), which has for years languished near the bottom of the political league tables, is reportedly recruiting 1,000 new members a month, after the party leader Kazuo Shii harangued Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda in February. “Day temp staff workers are being discarded like disposable articles,” said Mr Shii in a TV clip endlessly circulated on the internet. The party sells 1.5 million copies of its daily Akahata (Red Flag) newspaper, though this is well down on its 3.5 million peak.

But the growth of the JCP is an anomaly. Union membership in Japan is at an all-time low and the country is still dominated by the pro-business Liberal Democrats, who have ruled almost continuously for half a century. Still, The Crab Ship phenomenon is a sign that many of Japan?s young are hungry for radical change.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/japanese-discontent-voiced-in-novel-sales-905051.html

Surge in number of temp workers involved in work-related accidents

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The number of temporary workers dispatched by employment agencies who were involved in work-related accidents increased nine-fold over a three-year period, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said.

The finding demonstrates that temporary workers engage in dangerous labor without receiving adequate safety guidance, which will likely have an influence on discussions on amendments to the law on dispatched workers, labor experts say.

In 2007, 5,885 temporary workers dispatched by employment agencies to various workplaces were forced to take four days or more off work after being injured in work-related accidents, 36 of which proved fatal. The figure is nine times that of 2004, which stood at 667, according to ministry statistics.

The number of overall workers who got injured or died in work-related accidents remained mostly level over that period — 132,248 in 2004 and 131,478 in 2007 — highlighting a sharp increase in accidents involving temp workers.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080821p2a00m0na013000c.html

Helping hand for immigrants

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Hope seen in plan to promote Japanese-language education, visas

Under the plan, the rights of immigrants, defined by the U.N. as people who live outside their home country more than 12 months, would be bolstered and efforts made to make life more convenient for them here.

Those already in Japan would receive the same benefits as those who hope to live in Japan.

Under the plan, a law banning racism would be enacted. The government would ensure immigrants receive the same public welfare services as Japanese do, encourage universities and vocational schools to accept more foreign students and strengthen Japanese-language education.

The conditions for granting foreigners permanent resident and long-term resident status would also be relaxed.

The plan still must be accepted by the ruling coalition and approved by the Cabinet.

If this happens, part of the plan that does not require legislative changes, including loosening conditions for permanent resident status, could take effect within a year, as Nakagawa proposed to the government.

Policies requiring new laws or revisions, such as an antiracism law, will have to clear the Diet. Sakanaka hopes the needed legislation will be enacted in three years.

Keiko Tanaka, director of the nonprofit organization Hamamatsu Foreign Children Education Support Association, praised the LDP members for the plan.

“Children are able to communicate in Japanese but have not reached the stage where they study subjects such as history and science in Japanese. That’s largely because they spend time in language classes, while other kids are pursuing those subjects,” Tanaka said.

Tanaka, whose NPO sends Japanese teachers to schools in Hamamatsu, hinted that schools may as well have poor-performing children repeat a grade, even though this is a rarity.

In addition to giving foreign children better educational opportunities, the plan would potentially give foreign workers more protection by making it easier to get permanent resident or long-term resident status, replacing the less-secure working visa.

Foreigners with working visas who are unemployed at the time they have to renew their visa are in theory illegal residents.

Louis Carlet, deputy general secretary of the National Union of General Workers Tokyo Nambu, said he wishes the plan had specifically done away with the current lump-sum pension payout that allows foreigners to recoup a fraction of the money they’ve paid into the system if they leave.

People have to pay pension premiums for 25 years to qualify for benefits when they turn 65. Foreigners who pay the premiums but leave Japan after working less than 25 years get a lump-sum amount, which increases proportionately up to only 36 months.

“The system basically means (Japan is) trying to send foreigners away in three years,” Carlet said.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20080816f1.html

Foreign workers need social security

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Opinion is firming in the government and the Liberal Democratic Party that Japan should more proactively accept workers from overseas.

This development comes against the backdrop of the business world facing increasingly serious labor shortages amid the accelerating globalization of markets and the rapid aging of society coupled with the chronically low birthrate.

Expansion of acceptance of foreign workers, however, cannot happen without what should be called Japan’s “internationalization from within,” or the installment of a set of arrangements benefiting foreigners working in Japan, including employment security, medical services and education.

A large number of foreigners under the system, however, are in fact employed as cheap, unskilled laborers, in violation of the law that bans employing foreigners in unskilled jobs in such sectors as textile and machinery manufacturing, where finding Japanese recruits is getting more and more difficult.

A survey by the Justice Ministry showed that the number of companies and other organizations that were found to be abusing their foreign employees under the “job-training” system, such as by failing to pay them due wages, stood at 449 throughout the country in 2007–an all-time high.

In the words of a 27-year-old Chinese man who came to Japan after applying to participate in the government-run job training system in 2005: “The promise of ‘job training’ is totally false.”

“I was forced to do a farming job from 5 in the morning through 10 at night every day, without any paid days off,” the man, who now lives in the Kanto region, said.

“My pay was a little more than 100,000 yen a month, and my employer banned me from using a cell phone and confiscated my passport,” he said. “I can’t afford to return home, as doing so before I finish the three-year period under the training system would mean that I’d forfeit the deposit, or guarantee money, that I managed to raise from my relatives.”

Ippei Torii, secretary general of Zentoitsu Workers Union, a Tokyo-based trade union, who has been tackling this problem for years, said: “Problems afflicting foreign workers have been worsening year by year. Many people are subject to such abuses as sexual harassment and having their wages illegally skimmed.”

A fact-finding survey conducted by the municipal government of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, where many foreigners of Japanese ancestry live, covering workers from South American countries in the city showed that 32 percent of the foreigners polled were not covered by any insurance for medical care.

Many of them, when asked why they were uninsured, cited such reasons as they could not afford to pay premiums and their employers did not allow them to have health care coverage, according to the survey.

Those not covered by medical insurance, must, of course, pay their medical bill in full if they fall ill or are injured.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080813TDY04302.htm

DPJ may face backlash over suffrage issue

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Democratic Party of Japan President Ichiro Ozawa’s pet project to give foreign permanent residents the right to vote in local elections is facing fierce opposition within the party.

The party has been discussing the issue through the vehicle of an advisory body. However, the discussion reached a stalemate, with both sides locked in a bitter confrontation. Some party members say it is likely that the party will postpone concluding the issue until after the next general election for the House of Representatives.

The DPJ has said that it would work to realize local suffrage for foreign permanent residents as part of the party’s basic policy formulated at the party’s founding in 1998.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080812TDY02308.htm

Taking time off not so easy

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“The disparity in how much time workers can take off or how much money they can spend for leisure has been widening. As for leisure time, the amount of overtime hours has been increasing among permanent employees, while the mass retirement of baby boomers also had an impact,” said Hisaya Yanagita, a senior researcher at the JPCSED.

“However, the disparity has been growing between generations, and women in their 30s, many of whom are raising children or working part-time jobs, tend to be polarized in how much leisure time they can have or how much they can spend on leisure activities,” he said.

It also has become difficult for employees to use annual paid holidays, which are secured by the Labor Standards Law.

On average, employees took 46.6 percent of their paid holidays in 2007, when the average number of annual paid holidays was 17.7 days, a record low. The rate has been declining since it peaked in 1993, when employees took 56.1 percent of their paid holidays.

These survey results reflect an apparent employee mentality that workplaces make it difficult for them to use paid holidays, while the results also shed light on structural problems in workplaces, as shown by those who said it was difficult to find someone to take over their duties while on vacation, that they couldn’t take holidays because of heavy workload or that they wanted to leave some paid holidays in case of illness or other unanticipated situations.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080811TDY03103.htm

An aging Japan slowly opens up to foreigners

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Yanti Kartina left her family in Indonesia and joined 200 other nurses in moving to Japan, where a rapidly growing elderly population has created a desperate need for careers in old-age homes and hospitals.

The nurses, who are expected to learn Japanese and requalify as they work, are seen as an important test case as Japan struggles with the world’s fastest growing elderly population and a work force that is forecast to shrink, potentially devastating the economy.

“Japan is the first developed country to face this kind of population crisis,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, a former immigration bureau chief in Tokyo who now heads a research institute.

With more than a quarter of Japanese expected to be aged over 65 by 2015, the country faces serious economic consequences, including labor shortages that could weigh on the gross domestic product.

A group of governing party politicians see immigration as a possible solution and have presented Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda with a radical new proposal that seeks to have immigrants make up 10 percent of the population in 50 years’ time. Government figures show the work force is on course to shrink by eight million in the next 10 years.

If the necessary laws are passed, mass immigration could transform a country once so wary of foreigners that it excluded them almost entirely for more than 200 years until the 19th century.

“I don’t think there is any way forward but to accept immigrants,” Sakanaka said.

Even now, the idea of allowing in more foreigners is often described as a risk to Japan’s relatively crime-free and homogeneous society.

Many landlords refuse to rent apartments to foreigners and few Japanese employers offer immigrant workers the same rights as their Japanese colleagues. Less than 2 percent of Japan’s almost 128 million population are foreign-born.

Tetsufumi Yamakawa, chief economist at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, believes that immigration, combined with efforts to draw more women and elderly people into the labor market, could lift growth above the annual 1 percent or less forecast by many analysts.

“I think this is very good timing to start thinking about this,” he said. “The decline is already in sight.”

The Indonesian nurses, who have been recruited to work in short-staffed hospitals and homes for the elderly, are the latest wave of controlled immigration. Government officials hope they will face fewer problems than their predecessors.

More than 300,000 Brazilian immigrants of Japanese descent have been a boon for Japan’s automotive and electronics factories, where many of them work. They have also helped the Brazilian economy by remitting $2.2 billion dollars home in 2005, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.

But in many ways, the Brazilians have failed to fit in even though they are the descendants of Japanese who left rural areas to start afresh in Latin America, mostly in the early 20th century.

Believing their heritage would give them an advantage in blending in, the Japanese government loosened conditions for working visas for them in 1990. The move was not entirely successful.

The Brazilians complain of discrimination and lack of schooling for their children, many of whom speak only Portuguese, while their Japanese neighbors are often shocked by their late-night parties and failure to conform to rules like trash recycling.

“They were just brought in and nothing was done to help them in terms of welfare,” said Hirohiko Nakamura, a lawmaker with the governing Liberal Democratic Party and a member of the committee that produced the new immigration report.

“Then people blame the foreigners for the problems, even though it’s Japan that invited them here and didn’t do anything for them,” he added.

The worst case, he says, are the tens of thousands of mostly Chinese workers allowed in on temporary “trainee” visas that allow them to work in menial jobs on farms and in factories.

That system has kept some small regional businesses ticking over, but reports of abuses like extremely low pay, sexual harassment and confiscated passports abound.

Many say that despite the desperate need for workers, Japan is setting hurdles too high for the latest batch of immigrants.

The Indonesian nurses and care workers will have only six months of Japanese study before starting full-time work. They must pass the relevant national examinations within three or four years while working as assistants, or be forced to return home.

Nakamura is optimistic about their chances, citing the example of some of the country’s highest profile immigrants.

“Look at the Mongolian sumo wrestlers,” he said. “They speak Japanese really well.”

But Sakanaka, the former immigration bureau chief, worried that the Indonesian nursing program would end in failure because of the complexity of the Japanese language and because he thought the rules had been made too strict.

“I think the system will turn out to be an embarrassment,” he said. “Almost nobody will pass and they will be told to go home.”

He advocates inviting in younger foreigners and allowing them to complete their training in Japanese before starting work.

On a broader basis, he and others say, opposition to immigration in Japan is less widespread than allegations of discrimination and exclusion would suggest.

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=15076481

Tanigaki touts foreign tourism to boost economy

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Attracting more foreign tourists can help offset the loss of economic vitality foreseen as the nation ages and the population declines, tourism minister Sadakazu Tanigaki said Monday.

“Even if we work hard to expand internal demand while the population declines, it won’t be enough,” Tanigaki said in an interview with The Japan Times. “It will be necessary to bring in people, commodities and money from developing areas.”

To this end, the Japan Tourism Agency will be established under the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry in October.

Welcoming more Asian tourists is a way to revitalize the economy, the former finance minister said.

Tanigaki said Japan has huge growth potential in tourism. “Our country has such a (long) history and abundant nature with four seasons,” Tanigaki said. “There is still room for further growth” in the number of foreign visitors, he stressed.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20080807a3.html

Once a ‘gaijin,’ always a ‘gaijin’

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Gaijin. It seems we hear the word every day. For some, it’s merely harmless shorthand for “gaikokujin” (foreigner). Even Wikipedia (that online wall for intellectual graffiti artists) had a section on “political correctness” that claimed illiterate and oversensitive Westerners had misunderstood the Japanese word.

I take a different view: Gaijin is not merely a word; it is an epithet ? about the billions of people who are not Japanese. It makes assumptions about them that go beyond nationality.

Let’s deal with the basic counterarguments: Calling gaijin a mere contraction of gaikokujin is not historically accurate. According to ancient texts and prewar dictionaries, gaijin (or “guwaijin” in the contemporary rendering) once referred to Japanese people too. Anyone not from your village, in-group etc., was one. It was a way of showing you don’t belong here ? even (according to my 1978 Kojien, Japan’s premier dictionary) “regarded as an enemy” (“tekishi”). Back then there were other (even more unsavory) words for foreigners anyway, so gaijin has a separate etymology from words specifically meaning “extra-national.”

Even if one argues that modern usage renders the two terms indistinguishable, gaijin is still a loaded word, easily abused.

For gaijin is essentially “n–ger” and should be likewise obsolesced.

Fortunately our media is helping out, long since adding gaijin to the list of “hoso kinshi yogo” (words unfit for broadcast).

So can we. Apply Japan’s slogan against undesirable social actions: “Shinai, sasenai” (“I won’t use it, I won’t let it be used.”).

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20080805ad.html