教育委員会が「偽装請負」で指導を受ける。そんな事態が後を絶たない。それでも多くの教委が外国語指導助手（ＡＬＴ）の業務委託（請負）を続ける背景には、自治体の厳しい財政事情や人材確保の難しさがある。一方で外国人の相談を受ける労働組合には、ＡＬＴが続々と駆け込む。偽装請負トラブルの火種を抱えたまま、多くの教委が来春、小学校の英語必修化を迎えることになる。
Average minimum hourly wage to rise 15 yen to 728 yen in Japan
A government advisory panel is expected to recommend Friday that a weighted-average hourly minimum wage in Japan be raised by 15 yen to 728 yen for fiscal 2010 that started in April, government sources said Thursday.
The increase would exceed 10 yen for fiscal 2009 and be the fourth consecutive double-digit increase. The government’s growth strategy, adopted in June, calls for raising the minimum hourly wage in each of the 47 Japanese prefectures to at least 800 yen as early as possible.
The recommendation by the Central Minimum Wages Council seeks to raise the minimum hourly wage by some 10 yen in 41 prefectures and by 13 to 30 yen in the other six prefectures where minimum wage income slips far below welfare benefits, the sources said.
The recommended increase stands at 30 yen in Tokyo and Kanagawa, at 15 yen in Kyoto, at 14 yen in Osaka and Saitama, and at 13 yen in Hokkaido.
If the recommendation is accepted, welfare benefits’ excess over minimum wage income will be eliminated in Aomori, Akita, Saitama and Chiba prefectures. Such excess will still exist in Hokkaido and Tokyo, and Miyagi, Kanagawa, Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo and Hiroshima prefectures.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100805p2g00m0dm077000c.html
Japan’s trainee programme ‘human trafficking’: lawyer
A Japanese human rights lawyer Thursday labelled a government-backed foreign trainee programme as a “form of human trafficking”, saying dozens had died from apparent overwork.
Japan has invited tens of thousands of foreigners for industrial training programmes as low-wage apprentices, mostly from China, Indonesia and the Philippines, since the 1990s, officially so they can learn new skills.
“There is a huge difference between the purpose of this system and the reality,” said Lila Abiko of the Lawyers’ Network for Trainees in Japan.
“The purpose they say is the international contribution through transferring technologies through the person from a developing country. But actually this system functions to receive cheap unskilled labourers and exploit them.”
The Japanese government, which allows little immigration of unskilled workers, started the trainees’ programme in 1993, after the world’s second-largest economy dived into a serious downturn.
Amid rising concern over abuses, the lawyer said that a record 35 workers from Asia had died in Japan in the year to March 2009 alone.
The Japan International Training Cooperation Organization (JITCO), which oversees the programmes, had said last year that of these 16 had died of heart and brain ailments, five in workplace accidents and one had committed suicide.
A JITCO spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
The following year, 27 deaths were reported, including nine from heart and brain ailments and three suicides, Abiko said.
This month a Japanese labour office for the first time recognised that a Chinese intern employed under the programme had become the victim of what in Japan is called “karoshi” or “death through overwork.”
Jiang Xiao Dong, 31, from Jiangsu province died after a heart attack in June 2008 after working more than 100 hours overtime the month before at a metal processing firm northeast of Tokyo.
Abiko, who represents Jiang’s family, said one of his time cards showed he had worked 350 hours in November 2007 alone.
She said many of the interns had paid high deposits in their home countries, often equivalent to several years’ income, to unauthorised local brokers who helped them register for the programme and travel to Japan.
“I think this is one form of human trafficking, especially when they are seized by the throat because of the deposit,” she said.
One Chinese trainee, Li Quing Zhi, 34, said he came in 2007 to learn Japanese cooking but instead did manual work at a manufacturing workshop at minimum wage, working 150 hours of unpaid overtime a month.
After repeated complaints he was fired in March, leaving him stranded.
“I cannot go back to China without getting the payment that I deserve,” said the man, who said his wife and two children are waiting for him.
Jorge Bustamante, UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, issued a warning in April about the trainee programmes.
The Justice Ministry was not available for comment when contacted late Thursday by AFP.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gXN3sBZiNLSKHP3WYJ_8Qj2PROjA
英語助手と先生、授業協力したら違法 契約巡り現場混乱
英語の授業中、外国語指導助手（ＡＬＴ）と日本人教員が言葉を交わさない――。ＡＬＴを業者への業務委託（請負）で確保する自治体で、奇妙な授業風景が繰り広げられている。２人が協力して授業に取り組むと「偽装請負」（労働者派遣法違反）となってしまうからだ。ルールを守れずに労働局から指導を受ける教育委員会が相次ぎ、教室で混乱が起きている。
Wages Rise for Fourth Month on Overtime as Japanese Employers Limit Hiring
Japan’s wages rose for a fourth month as employers had staff work more hours instead of adding to payrolls, a trend that may sustain the recovery without reducing the economy’s reliance on exports to propel growth.
Monthly wages including overtime and bonuses increased 1.5 percent in June from a year earlier to 437,677 yen ($5,050), the Labor Ministry said today in Tokyo.
A gradual rebound in salaries will help support consumer spending in coming months, according to economist Yoshimasa Maruyama. That will reduce the damage from a lack of job gains after figures last week showed the unemployment rate rose to a seven-month high, driven by a lack of positions for young people.
“Recent increases in overtime pay reflect the economic recovery,” Maruyama, a senior economist at Itochu Corp. in Tokyo, said before today’s report. “But companies are holding off on meaningfully increasing personnel costs” until the economic outlook becomes clearer, he said.
Special pay, a category that includes bonuses, gained 3.3 percent to 173,851 yen, today’s report showed. Mid-year bonuses at large companies rose for the first time in three years, according to business lobby Keidanren.
While overtime hours climbed for a sixth month on a year- on-year basis, the figure for manufacturers dropped from a month earlier, reflecting a recent stalling of production. Factory output slumped 1.5 percent in June, the biggest decline in more than a year, the Trade Ministry said last week.
Income Gap Wider As Irregular Workers Rise: Labor Ministry
Japan’s income gap is widening as companies are hiring more irregular workers, the Labor Ministry said Tuesday in its fiscal 2010 report on the country’s labor market.
The ministry noted that companies were prompted to hire more irregular workers in light of eased regulations on labor dispatch service.
The number of workers earning an annual salary of 1-2.5 million yen was in particular on the increase over the decade through 2007, according to the ministry’s latest White Paper on the Labour Economy.
In the 2000s, the ratio of irregular workers, including those dispatched from manpower agencies, grew at a faster clip, with the ratio now accounting for more than 30% of the country’s overall labor force.
This is mainly attributed to the fact that “Major firms, hoping to curtail personnel costs, expanded the hiring of irregular workers over those on a regular payroll,” the white paper says.
The ministry suggested in the paper that it is imperative for employers to turn irregular workers into permanent employees, so employers can provide higher wages and ensure stable job conditions.
Meanwhile, the number of those fresh from university and college having difficulty finding a job has also increased lately, with hiring appetite souring at firms.
“It is necessary for companies seeking sustainable management to make viable recruitment plans without being affected by short-term economic trends,” the ministry said in the paper.
Dying to work: Japan Inc.’s foreign trainees
“The Industrial Trainees and Technical Interns program often fuels demand for exploitative cheap labor under conditions that constitute violations of the right to physical and mental health, physical integrity, freedom of expression and movement of foreign trainees and interns, and that in some cases may well amount to slavery. This program should be discontinued and replaced by an employment program.”
JORGE BUSTAMANTE, U.N. SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF MIGRANTS, APRIL 2010
According to Lila Abiko of the Lawyers’ Network for Trainees, foreign “trainees” and “interns” are really just cheap migrant labor under another name.
Although the official purpose of the training and internship program is “international contribution and cooperation through human resource development of technology,” Abiko believes the reality is very different.
“There is a big gap between this system’s purpose and the reality. This is a fundamental problem,” she said.
Abiko argues that the trainee and intern system developed the way it did in Japan because of innate problems in the country’s immigration law.
In 1989, at the height of Japan’s bubble economy, an amendment was made to the Immigration and Control and Refugee Recognition Act that established the new “trainee” status-of-residence category.
At this time, a massive need for labor had developed as a result of Japan’s booming economy, but public opposition to the notion of accepting unskilled foreign labor en masse remained high.
Fearful of upsetting public opinion but under pressure from corporate Japan, the government decided to let in foreign migrant workers as “trainees.” At the same time it also granted Brazilians of Japanese descent long-term residency status.
Thus, Abiko claims, corporate Japan’s hunger for labor was largely sated, but a system had been formed whose true intentions were concealed behind a facade of altruistic intentions.
Originating mainly from China and Southeast Asia, trainees and interns are lured to Japan with the promise that they will acquire skills and knowledge they can later use in their own country. Instead, many of them get low-paid, unskilled jobs, minus the basic rights and safeguards any Japanese worker would enjoy.
Recent amendments to the Immigration Control Act, which also included changes to Japan’s alien registration card system, have improved the situation for participants of the internship program, although arguably it is a case of too little, too late.
Under the old system, those in the first year of the program were officially classed as “trainees,” not workers, meaning they were unable to claim the protections Japanese labor law affords regular employees.
For example, the minimum wage in Japan varies according to prefecture, and currently the national average is ¥713 per hour. But as foreign trainees are not technically “workers,” employers are not obliged to pay them even this. Instead, they receive a monthly “trainee allowance,” which for most first-year trainees falls between ¥60,000 and ¥80,000 — the equivalent to an hourly wage in the range of ¥375 to ¥500 for a full-time 40-hour week.
For first-year trainees, trying to survive on such a low income is a real struggle, so most have to do a great deal of overtime just to make ends meet.
Although the “trainee” residency status still exists for foreign workers who arrived before 2010, it is currently being phased out, and from 2011 all first-year participants in the program will be classed as technical interns. This a significant step forward, as the Labor Standards Law and the Minimum Wage Act apply to foreign migrant workers with technical-intern residency status. However, whether migrant workers are actually able to access the protections they are entitled to is another matter, and the issue of oversight — or the lack of it — is still a long way from being resolved.
Abiko believes this absence of proper oversight has grown out of the internship program’s weak regulatory structure and a general lack of government accountability. The government entrusts most of the operations of the internship program to JITCO, an authority that lacks the power to sanction participating organizations or companies, says Abiko.
“JITCO is just a charitable organization. It is very clear that JITCO is not appropriate to regulate and monitor this program.”
In addition, she argues, the financial relationship between JITCO and the collectives or companies under which trainees work makes JITCO’s role as a regulatory body even more untenable. JITCO’s total income for the 2008 financial year was ¥2.94 billion. More than half this amount, ¥1.66 billion, came from “support membership fees” paid by the companies themselves.
“How can JITCO appropriately regulate and monitor their support members when they are dependent on them for membership fees?” she said.
Executive pay on the rise at top Japanese firms
Japan has at least three listed companies where a top executive earned more than 100 times the average annual salary for employees in the year ended March, according to their settlement accounts.
“I felt disheartened to hear that the president received about 900 million yen when many workers are wondering every day how to save on even 1,000 yen,” says one [Nissan] employee.
A female employee at Dai Nippon Printing said the president’s level of compensation “came as a shock because bonuses for employees have been falling nonstop.”
Salaries of company employees in Japan have been stagnating.
While executive compensation at large corporations capitalized at 1 billion yen or more increased 23 percent from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2007, the salaries of employees have more or less remained unchanged over the same period, according to Finance Ministry statistics.
The cash earnings for employees fell year on year for 21 consecutive months through February partly due to the global financial crisis, according to labor ministry figures.
Talks drag on, teachers fired in Berlitz case
After 20 months of legal wrangling, neither side has managed to snag a win in Berlitz Japan‘s ¥110 million lawsuit against five teachers and their union, Begunto.
On the recommendation of the case’s lead judge, the company and union have been in court-mediated reconciliation talks since December. The agreement to enter the talks came after a year of court hearings into the suit.
“The vast, vast majority of cases (in Japan) are decided out of court, and that’s the way the whole thing is designed,” explains lawyer Timothy Langley, president of Langley Enterprise K.K., a consultancy specializing in labor issues. “It works even though it’s frustrating; people eventually define the solution themselves.”
Louis Carlet, one of the union officials being sued, describes progress at the once-a-month, 30-minute negotiating sessions as “glacially slow.”
It will be up to the judge to decide how long to let this process play out, says Tadashi Hanami, professor emeritus at Sophia University and former chair of the Central Labor Relations Commission. “Talks for the purpose of conciliatory settlement will continue as long as the judge finds there is a possibility for settlement by compromise.”
The current focus of negotiations is the amount of notice union members should give the company ahead of industrial action. Initially, Berlitz Japan offered to drop their lawsuit if teachers gave a week’s notice before striking. Begunto proposed five minutes. Since teachers typically only learn the next day’s schedule the night before, the judge instructed the company to come up with a better offer.
Asked how much notice unions legally have to give before striking, Langley replied, “None. Zero. That’s one of the beauties of a strike: You just strike.”
In the latest round of talks held Thursday, Berlitz Japan requested contract teachers give strike notification by 3 p.m. the day before, and per-lesson teachers by 5 p.m. Begunto pointed out to the judge that per-lesson teachers don’t receive their schedule until 6 p.m. the day before. Union executives have taken the offer back to members for consideration.
The battle between Berlitz Japan and Begunto began with a strike launched Dec. 13, 2007, as Berlitz Japan and its parent company, Benesse Corp., were enjoying record profits. Teachers, who had gone without an across-the-board raise for 16 years, struck for a 4.6-percent pay hike and a one-month bonus. The action grew into the largest sustained strike in the history of Japan’s language school industry, with more than 100 English, Spanish and French teachers participating in walkouts across Kanto.
On Dec. 3, 2008, Berlitz Japan claimed the strike was illegal and sued for a total of ¥110 million in damages. Named in the suit were the five teachers volunteering as Begunto executives, as well as two union officials: the president of the National Union of General Workers Tokyo Nambu, Yujiro Hiraga , and Carlet, former NUGW case officer for Begunto and currently executive president of Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union (Tozen).
While believing their strike to be legal, Begunto decided to suspend industrial action until the lawsuit is settled rather than risk the dismissal of union members. However, the company fired two of the teachers it’s suing anyway.
One, who didn’t want to be named, received word of his dismissal just before shipping out to Afghanistan as a U.S. Army reservist at the end of July 2009. Berlitz Japan had allowed the teacher to take unpaid leave for military duty several times before the strike. But after being the only teacher at his Yokohama branch to walk out, he began getting complaints from students.
According to Begunto members, after being ordered to deploy to Afghanistan, Berlitz Japan told the teacher he could take a leave of absence of less than a year, and that he’d have to quit if he needed more than a year. Two days before he left for Afghanistan the company fired him. According to the dismissal letter, his performance was subpar and was hurting the company’s image.
“The union believes strongly that the teacher’s dismissal was because he was the only striker at Yokohama,” says Carlet.
Another of the teachers named in the suit, Catherine Campbell, was fired earlier this month after taking too long to recover from late-stage breast cancer cancer. In June 2009, Campbell took a year of unpaid leave to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Because Berlitz Japan failed to enroll Campbell in the shakai hoken health insurance scheme, she was unable to receive the two-thirds wage coverage it provides and had to live with her parents in Canada during treatment. The company denied Campbell’s request to extend her leave from June to Sept. 2010 and fired her for failing to return to work.
Berlitz Japan work rules allow for leave-of-absence extensions where the company deems it necessary.
“If cancer is not such a case, what would be?” Campbell asks. “On one hand, I’m lucky to be alive and healthy enough to even want to go back to work, so everything else pales in comparison,” she explained. “But on the other, the company’s decision does seem hard to understand. The leave is unpaid, and I don’t receive any health benefits, so it wouldn’t cost Berlitz anything to keep me on; and for me, it’s that much harder to restart my life without a job.”
Michael Mullen, Berlitz Japan senior human resources manager, declined to comment for this article, writing in an e-mail, “At the current time the company does not want to make any comments due to the ongoing legal dispute.”
The union is fighting both dismissals at the Tokyo Labor Commission. The panel is also hearing an unfair labor practices suit filed by Begunto that charges Berlitz Japan bargained in bad faith and illegally interfered with the strike by sending a letter to teachers telling them the strike was illegal and to stop walking out.
The next round of reconciliation talks and Tokyo Labor Commission hearing are both scheduled for Sept. 6.
Uniqlo chief Yanai calls on Japan to internationalize, accept immigration
The positive sides to immigration are enormous, as immigrants would both increase the population and stimulate the economy. If Japanese come into everyday contact with foreigners from childhood, it would also help alleviate Japanese people’s distaste for internationalization. Europe, the U.S. and all the other advanced nations in the world accept immigrants. As the economy grows more globalized, this is not an age when Japan can get along with Japanese people only.
We are making all Japanese staff at our headquarters and all employees at store manager level or higher study English to the point they can get a TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) score of at least 700 points in the next two years. (A perfect score is 990.) The number of our foreign employees is rising, English will be made Fast Retailing’s official language in fiscal 2012, and we are aiming to globalize company management.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100724p2a00m0na003000c.html