  Government is responsible for securing decent jobs for young people -- Akahata editorial, September 21 (excerpts)Corporations have started giving job interviews to students who will graduate from high school next spring. As of the end of July, the ratio of job offers to job seekers stood at 0.69. This means that only seven out of 10 can find jobs, although jobs at large corporations reportedly will increase slightly thanks to a business recovery. Recently, a growing number of young people are found to be left even without a part-time job after graduation. The 2004 White Paper on the Labor Economy estimates that there are 520,000 young people who are not employed or who are not even looking for a job, an increase of 40,000 from last year. It is also estimated that 2.17 million young people are part-time workers. It is a grave concern for the society that young people can not find jobs or are discouraged from working. This is due to the ongoing corporate restructuring by which large corporations reduce their workforce as much as they can in order to maintain high-profit structures without recruiting new workers. This finds expression in a drastic decrease in the number of job offers to high school graduates to 220,000 in 2003 from 1.618 million in 1992. What is worse, large corporations are now carrying out a strategy to replace as many full time regular jobs as possible with low-paying part-time jobs. Assembly lines at major electronics makers depend mostly on contingent and contracted workers. Only 26 percent of 3,000 employees at the Sharp Kameyama plant, which assembles the liquid crystal display television sets, are regular employees. More than 70 percent of the workforce are contracted workers who work 12 hours on two shifts. It is irresponsible for large corporations to try to secure quick profits by using low-paid workers from staffing agencies instead of hiring young people. An increase in the numbers of young part-time workers, unemployed, and non-employed is a serious problem that will undermine the basis of economic and social development in Japan. Large corporations must fulfill their social responsibility for increasing employment of young people. A comparative study shows that the ratio of the budget for promoting employment of young people to gross domestic product (GDP) in Japan is one-fortieth that of France, and one-tenth that of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries on average. The Japanese Communist Party demands that the government and large corporations assume their responsibility to secure decent jobs for young people. If corporations end the practice of forcing workers to work overtime without pay and encourage workers to use all their annual paid holidays, 3 million new jobs will be created. (end) |