September 21, 2024

Japanese Communist Party Executive Committee Chair Tamura Tomoko held a press conference on September 20 in the Diet building to announce a policy titled “Let’s work together to expand workers’ free time by reducing working hours in tandem with wage increases.”

In this policy, she proposed “a bill to promote shorter working hours to expand free time.”

The bill to promote expansion of free time is the general term for a program bill aimed at amending the Labor Standards Law and other relevant laws in order to achieve shorter working hours along with pay hikes.

Tamura pointed out that many workers, including young people, have been voicing their desire for more free time, and noted that working hours in Japan are about 300 hours longer per year than those in European countries, and that “death from overwork (karoshi)” has long been a social problem in Japan.

In order to ensure a decent life for working people, the bill requires the government to take necessary measures to promptly shift the legal working hours applicable to all companies to a “7-hour day, 35-hour week”.

In order to immediately end the current situation in which even the “8-hour work day” standard is collapsing, the bill aims to tighten overtime regulations and to eliminate illegal and law-evasive long working hours.

Tamura said, “Workers’ annual real wages have decreased by as much as 336,000 yen in the past eleven years since the comeback of the LDP-Komei government to power. The decrease in people’s incomes has cooled both consumption and demand, leading to the stagnation of the Japanese economy as a whole.”

She added, “Only with a substantial hike in wages exceeding the rise in prices in concurrence with shorter working hours can decent and quality lifestyles be realized.”