Panel considers business circles' call for removal of restrictions on use of temporary workers

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Panel considers business circles' call for removal of restrictions on use of temporary workers

A government panel chaired by Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has begun consideration of the removal of restrictions on the use of temporary workers in order to meet the demands of business circles that will lead to a wholesale adverse revision of the labor law.

According to the minutes of a Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy meeting held on November 30 that was published on December 5, council members representing business circles' interests proposed to relieve corporations of legal obligations under the Worker Dispatch Law.

Calling it the "Labor Big Bang," Canon Inc. Chairman Mitarai Fujio, who is also the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) chairman, and three other non-government members called for a revision of the Worker Dispatch Law that limits the term of labor lease contract to three years (one year in manufacturing industry) and obliges corporations to offer direct employment to the temporary workers if the corporations continue to use them.

In order to evade this obligation, large corporations employing many temporary workers are resorting to illegal practices in which these workers are disguised as contract workers supervised by staffing companies.

The business circles' demands made at the panel meeting is tantamount to legalizing these illegal practices to enable corporations to use workers at their convenience and at the least cost to them.

The Worker Dispatch Law goes against the principle of the Employment Security Law stipulating that employers are directly held responsible for their workers based on remorse that in the prewar days workers were deprived of their rights due to contract work and other forms of indirect employment.

However, the business circles are proposing that corporations be allowed to continue to use temporary workers without a term limit, pretending as if this change is to the workers' benefit, using such phrases as "not bound by the clock" and "multi-linear work styles."

Faced with this outrageous demand, Health, Labor, and Welfare Minister Yanagisawa Hakuo has had to point out that the basis of the labor law is to prescribe the minimum protection of workers. In the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, no member represents the interest of workers.
- Akahata, December 6, 2006