Japan Press Weekly

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2011 January 5 - 11 [ECONOMY]

Shii proposes package to increase wages

Japanese Communist Party Chair Shii Kazuo urged the government to carry out a package of wage hikes to rebuild people’s livelihoods and revitalize the stagnant economy.

This remark was made during his televised interview on NHK’s Sunday debate program on January 9.

In the interview, Shii pointed out that the major problem regarding the Japanese economy is that Japan’s economic growth stalled because workers’ wages decreased and consumer spending dropped while large corporations amassed 244 trillion yen in internal reserves.

Shii said, “In order to address this problem, the government needs to implement a package of measures to increase wages.”

Shii proposed that the government provide full-time positions to all non-regular workers through a drastic revision of the Worker Dispatch Law, increase the hourly minimum wage to 1,000 yen or more by providing an appropriate financial support to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), reduce the wage gap between large companies’ workers and SMEs’ workers (who comprise 70% of the total workforce) through substantial subsidies and financial aid to SMEs, and tighten rules on dismissals in order to put an end to arbitrary corporate firings like that being carried out by Japan Airlines against its pilots and cabin attendants.