May 31, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has severely affected workers, especially women workers. It was recently found in government data that the number of women non-regular workers decreased by one million in the last two months.

The Internal Affairs Ministry on May 29 released the results of its labor force survey which show that the total number of non-regular workers in April marked a year-on-year decrease of 970,000, a record drop since 2014 for which comparative data are available. Of the 970,000 workers, 710,000 were women. In the last two months, the number of female non-regular workers decreased by 1.08 million from 14.87 million in February to 13.79 million in April.

Such a huge number of workers lost their jobs as companies suspended their businesses temporarily or shut down permanently due to the government’s stay-at-home and business suspension requests. For those who lived in houses provided by their companies, the loss of jobs also meant the loss of housing.

Non-regular workers are low-paid and their employment is unstable. Two-thirds of such workers are women, which is a kind of indirect discrimination at workplaces. The coronavirus crisis has hit the already-marginalized female workers especially hard.

The latest opinion poll by the Asahi Shimbun (May 23-24) indicates that the cabinet approval rate was 33% among male respondents and 25% among female respondents. Of female respondents aged 50-69, less than 20% supported the Abe Cabinet and more than 60% were critical of the Cabinet. In a survey conducted by the Mainichi Shimbun (May 23), the Abe Cabinet approval rating was 31% among men and 21% among women. These figures represent strong criticism of the Abe Cabinet by women surveyed.