Non-regular employees work for low wages and with less job security. They also have few opportunities to improve their career prospects.
Efforts must be made to rectify the situation of these workers, ensuring they are treated in a manner commensurate with their job performance. This is a major task to be tackled in building “a society in which all 100 million-plus people are dynamically engaged.”
The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has compiled a five-year plan, effective from fiscal 2016, that will seek to convert non-permanent workers into regular employees while also improving their salaries and other working conditions.
Non-regular workers account for as much as 40 percent of the workforce, with an increasing number of young people and family breadwinners holding such employment status. The five-year plan includes numerical goals, the first of its kind to be set by the ministry, with a view to expediting efforts to address the problems facing non-permanent workers.
The ministry’s program seeks to lower the percentage of people who hold non-regular status despite their desire to become permanent employees, from the current 18.1 percent to 10 percent or less. Today the percentage of young non-permanent employees who want to change their status stands at a considerable 28.4 percent, while that of temporarily dispatched non-regular personnel is a no less substantial 41.8 percent.
The program aims to halve these figures, while
also seeking to curtail the wage disparities between non-regular and permanent employees.
Specific measures include a plan to increase subsidies to corporations trying to convert non-regular workers into permanent staff and improve their wage levels. Another is to ensure that Hello Work job placement offices extend greater assistance for people seeking to gain regular employment status.
A plan to enhance the public sector vocational training for jobs is also included.
Although it contains few newly devised measures, it is appropriate that the program aims to examine the degree of progress in achieving the intended goals, thereby ensuring that its measures better serve their purposes. Efforts should be made to steadily implement these measures and reach the targets.
Equal pay for equal work
Non-regular workers cannot expect their wages to be raised in accordance with their work experience, making it difficult to make future plans in their life. Many such employees hesitate to marry or raise children for financial reasons, a major factor behind our nation’s low birthrate. These situations are also contributing to low consumer spending and business stagnation.
Amid a reduction in the working population, it is indispensable to better motivate people to work by providing them with appropriate treatment, coupled with efforts to bring out the best in their abilities. Doing so will also benefit corporations, for one thing, as they can expect employees to work for them for extended periods while also improving corporate productivity. Companies should make proactive efforts in this respect.
The revised Temporary Staffing Services Law, which took effect last autumn, requires temporary staff placement agencies to implement such measures as one aimed at stabilizing the employment of temporary workers. From fiscal 2018, the law will allow temporary workers to ask for their status to change to employment for an indefinite period, after they have worked for over five years as personnel with an employment status of fixed duration.
The government needs to make these systems known to corporations.
Many non-permanent workers have to abandon their hope of becoming regular employees, due to the need to raise their children or provide nursing care for their relatives. One possible step toward improving the situation is to use a system in which employees work as regular staff but with specific labor conditions limiting their working hours and the location of their assignment.
The spread of such a system would help stabilize the employment of non-regular workers.
It is also necessary to reconsider how permanent employees should work, examining such problems as prolonged work hours.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said his administration will work to ensure companies stand by the principle of equal pay for equal work — workers making the same wages, regardless of their employment status, if they are engaged in equal work — a policy designed to improve the treatment of non-regular employees.
The question is how to set assessment criteria regarding whether a work assignment given to regular and non-regular employees can be regarded as “equal work,” considering such differences between the two types of workers as overtime, job relocation and the amount of responsibility they bear. This issue must be considered from now on.(The Yomiuri Shimbun)
Link: http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0002720712
20
