Japan Press Weekly

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2012 March 7 - 13 [LABOR]

House passes boneless rules on the use of temps

The ruling parties on March 8 used their majority to pass a temporary workers’ bill through the Lower House plenary session despite the absence of effective regulations on the use of temps as disposable labor. The Japanese Communist, the Social Democratic, and the Your parties voted against the bill to revise the Worker Dispatch Law.

The bill enables staffing agencies to continue to supply workers to the manufacturing industry and to use on-call temps. The bill postpones the introduction of an obligation for employers to offer direct employment to supplied temps if they find that they are working under disguised contracts.

The day before, the Democratic Party of Japan forcefully took a vote on the bill in concert with the Liberal Democratic and Komei parties in the House labor committee with no discussion at all.

JCP representative Takahashi Chizuko in the committee criticized this 3-party-agreement as an act of making light of committee deliberations.

Takahashi in opposition to the bill said, “The bill is extremely weak because it has many exceptions that favor employers.”

After the bill’s passage, JCP Chair Shii Kazuo held a press conference in the Diet building and said, “The bill initially proposed by the government had a lot of loopholes in the first place. Even so, it still called for a ban on the use of on-call workers as well as the use of temps in the manufacturing sector. However, the DPJ-LDP-Komei later agreed to modify the initial bill and eliminated these two bans.”