Language hurdle trips up Indonesian nurses

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More than half of 104 Indonesian nurses who came to Japan in 2008 through a bilateral economic partnership agreement to obtain nursing licenses have returned home, due mainly to difficulties meeting Japanese language requirements, it has been learned.

Through the EPA program, Indonesian nurses have been allowed to work in Japanese hospitals for three years as assistant nurses who take care of inpatients. They are all licensed nurses in Indonesia. The program requires they pass an annual national nursing certification test during their three-year stay.

When the first batch arrived in 2008, the national exam was severely criticized, as non-Japanese applicants were disadvantaged by their difficulty in reading complex kanji used in the exam.

For example, the word “jokuso” (bedsore), which is difficult to read even for a Japanese if it is written in kanji, appeared in the exam.

The criticism prompted the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry to simplify the exam last year. The ministry put kana alongside difficult kanji to indicate their pronunciation.

However, Indonesian nurses were discouraged by another aspect of the EPA program. As assistant nurses, they were not allowed to conduct medical treatments such as drip infusions and injections, treatments they had engaged in as licensed nurses in Indonesia.

In Japan, they were primarily in charge of services such as table setting and bathing inpatients. After leaving Japan, most of them found new jobs in medical institutions in Indonesia.

The government has an EPA program with the Philippines, through which Filipino nurses are able to work in Japan. It plans to introduce a similar scheme with Vietnam.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T120104004687.htm

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

Gaba ‘contractor’ status under fire from staff, courts

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Yet after stepping off the tarmac at Narita in August this year, William’s new life in Japan began to turn into something of a nightmare, and the source of the trouble was his new job working for Gaba as an English teacher.

According to William, his troubles began back home in the States when he was interviewed for a teaching position at Gaba by webcam.

“They told me I would be legally required to teach 160 lessons per month for visa sponsorship at a rate of ¥1,500 per lesson. But that didn’t happen.”

William says that rather than the 40 lessons he was promised, he averaged only around 25 — 30 on a good week, and sometimes as low as 10. “This was a source of conflict between myself and my management,” he says.

Despite the fact he was teaching what amounted to a part-time schedule, he had to be in the workplace 40 hours a week or more.

“I would be sitting around in a booth — they would call it a booth, but I would call it essentially a prison cell — and you are expected to sit there until something falls off the cart,” he says.

Gaba teachers are only paid for lessons taught, so the additional time William spent at the studio waiting for lessons was unpaid, yet the company, he says, expected him to be there at all times.

“Once I was verbally disciplined for going out to get lunch. I was verbally warned by my supervisor. . . . He said, ‘You need to be preparing your lesson notes and you need to look to the client like you are doing work and not going out and getting lunch. ‘ And I said, ‘OK, but on the other hand, I am a human being and I need to eat, and I am not being paid for this time so you don’t have the right to tell me that.’ “

Gaba is the only large eikaiwa chain in Japan that doesn’t pay travel costs to teachers commuting to training or work, so attending training would not only have cut into William’s teaching hours, it would actually have cost him money.

William refused to do any further training, and this put him at odds with his supervisors at Gaba, a situation that was exacerbated when he took two days off work.

“I had to go to the hospital because I literally couldn’t talk and found out I had a throat infection,” explains William. “They made me meet with the regional manager and told me not to miss any more days. They told me they were going to reduce my schedule as punishment.”

As an overseas recruit, Gaba was also the sponsor of William’s working visa, which made him feel particularly insecure.

“I felt very depressed, anxious, uncertain about what I was going to do. I was afraid I would have to go home. At this time I wasn’t making enough money monthly to pay anything more than pay my rent — I was losing money,” he recalls. “One day I went in for 8½ hours and I actually lost money going to work because none of my lessons booked. I figured out later on that this had something to do with the fact they had deleted my schedule from the client view of the instructors on their website.”

A complaint sometimes leveled by former Gaba instructors is that their learning studio manager or supervisor reduced their teaching schedule, and thus income, in order to discipline or control them.

In the Gaba employment contract that all teachers working in nonmanagerial roles sign, it states that “All instructors at Gaba teach under an Itaku, or entrusted, contract. The terms of this kind of system are different from employment. Entrusted instructors are essentially independent contractors that have been contracted to provide an established service, namely English instruction.”

In addition, many teachers also sign an “Entrusted Contract Awareness” document, which says: “Itaku contractors are not committed to fixed working hours as salaried employees are. We do not assign set work schedules but rely on instructors to inform us when they are available. Although we offer flexible scheduling, our peak times of operation are early weekday mornings, weekday evenings and all days weekends.”

Despite the fact that official company policy states they offer “flexible scheduling,” stories such as Herve’s and William’s suggest that, at least in some cases, pressure is put on instructors to choose shifts that fit the needs of the company alone.

Gaba teachers have even less freedom, despite their status as itaku contractors, with regards to dress.

Gaba was recently purchased by Japanese medical services company Nichii Gakkan for ¥10 billion. Earlier this month Canadian Bruce Anderson replaced Kenji Kamiyama as CEO of Gaba.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20111220a1.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