November 10, 2013

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

More and more universities and colleges in Japan have been trying to impose a five-year limit on contract periods of their teaching staff. This has become a major issue in society and some say that Japan’s higher education institutions are turning into “black corporations”.

Since the Labor Contract Law was revised in April, a fixed-term employee, after working for his/her employer for more than five years, has supposedly been able to get an indefinite term contract when he/she applies for that. However, many research institutions, including universities and colleges, have been trying to change their working rules so that they can dismiss their contract employees within five years. A lot of fixed-term researchers are concerned that they may be unable to renew their contracts any more.

As a measure to address this concern, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party reportedly plans to submit to the Diet a bill to extend the upper limit of contract terms from the current five years to 10 years. However, this may lead to further destabilizing employment.

The ruling party’s bill only extends the contract period. Even if fixed-term employees work for as long as 10 years, they are not guaranteed a permanent position. On top of that, even regular positions could be converted into temporary ones with less than 10-year contract terms.

The central government has reduced fundamental subsidies for national universities, including personnel expenses. The government should implement measures to prompt universities to give their workers permanent positions by increasing the subsidies drastically.

The number of fixed-term teachers at national universities has doubled to 15,000 over the past five years. Public universities that turned all their teaching staff into fixed-term employees, such as Tokyo Metropolitan University and Yokohama City University, are gaining bad reputations because they lost many capable teachers after doing so.

The percentage of university teachers aged 35 and under has dropped from 19% in 1989 to 11.9% in 2010. Young people are increasingly giving up the pursuit of doctoral degrees in anticipation of not finding a stable job even after obtaining a Ph.D. This is a great problem relating to the future of Japan’s quality of higher education.

The need now is not the extension of contract periods but the offering of full-time, regular positions to qualified, fixed-term teachers. Kyoto University Professor Yamanaka Shinya, a Nobel laureate in the fields of physiology and medicine, said, “About 90% of the staff at the research center for iPS cells are working on fixed-term contracts. They will turn 40 in ten years and may face dismissal at that point. I really want the authorities and the university management to offer permanent positions to them.”

Past related article:
> Part-time teachers at universities fight back against 5-year contract limit [March 29, 2013]