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Full-time employment will help stimulate economy and ease poverty: JCP Koike Japanese Communist Party Policy Commission Chair Koike Akira on a TV debate program broadcast on December 6 urged Labor Minister Nagatsuma Akira to make sincere efforts to have temporary workers hired as regular workers in order to help boost consumer spending. Koike stated that making a shift in the employment pattern from an unstable employment situation to a regular one will be an effective way to stimulate the economy and eliminate poverty. He also stressed the need to take measures to extend the period of unemployment insurance benefits and create jobs by increasing community-based public works projects. Koike said to Nagatsuma, gAlthough some industries, including auto manufacturing, have improved their business performance, they continue to use workers under fixed-term contracts. You, as labor minister, should give clear instructions to employers to give non-regular workers regular positions.h Nagatsuma said in reply, gI know that regular employment is desirable, but taking the present economic situation into account, what you have proposed appears to be difficult.h Citing an OECD survey showing that 80 percent of the poor in Japan have jobs, Koike said, gIn short, they are the working poor. This is because more than half of working women, one in every two young people, or one in every three workers overall in Japan are being used as non-regular workers.h He further said to the minister, gYou have just mentioned it would be difficult, but as long as the government neglects to have an appropriate economic policy, it cannot redistribute wealth to working people. In other words, it can never expand domestic consumption and get way from deflation spirals. Of course, it is necessary to revise the Worker Dispatch Law, but the government should not wait until the revision comes about and should immediately do something to increase the percentage of regular workers in the total workforce.h |
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