Lawyers, workers, and JCP discuss labor laws

Democratic lawyers, union workers, and the Japanese Communist Party on April 15 held their first joint meeting in Tokyo to help increase the movement to block government-sponsored bills to adversely revise labor legislation.

Yamaguchi Tomio, JCP House of Representatives member, reported that the ruling parties are planning to change the Labor Standards Law and the Worker Dispatch Law for the worse in the early stage of the Diet session.

Shimada Shuichi of the Japan Lawyers Association for Freedom pointed out that the adverse revision of labor legislation which includes freedom in dismissals, would open the door fully to a neo-liberal economic policy.

Ikuma Shigemi of the National Confederation of Trade Unions emphasized that the modification of labor legislation would not only aggravate working conditions but also attack the present principle to decide things based on labor-management negotiations, and that the bills to adversely revise labor laws must be scrapped. (end)