Convenience stores, chain restaurants warned about unpaid overtime

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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

Standards set for ‘name-only’ store managers

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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

Japanese only take average of 8 days paid vacation a year

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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

Japan’s working poor scratch living on society’s margins

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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

Japan defends steps to end discrimination

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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.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20080826a3.html

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