Japan Press Weekly

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2014 April 23 - May 6 [LABOR]

Workers in May Day rallies resolve to fight against Abe’s ‘labor reform’

In protest against the Abe government’s runaway policies such as an adverse revision of labor legislation, the 85th May Day rallies took place on May 1 at 305 locations across the country. About 27,000 people participated in the central May Day rally held at Yoyogi Park in Tokyo.

At the central gathering, Daikoku Sakuji, president of the National Confederation of Trade Unions (Zenroren), delivered a speech on behalf of the organizing committee. He stressed that this is the time for Japan’s labor unions to exert all their strength to block the Abe Cabinet’s “labor market reform”, including an adverse revision of the Worker Dispatching Law. Referring to the cabinet’s move to turn Japan into a war-fighting nation by changing the conventional interpretation of the Japanese Constitution, the Zenroren president called on the participants to increase united efforts to protect the pacifist Constitution and put it to good use in people’s lives.

In his solidarity speech, Japanese Communist Party Chair Shii Kazuo criticized the Abe administration for trying to change the Worker Dispatching Law in order to enable employers to replace all regular workers with temporary workers. Pointing out that the bill the government proposed to the Diet would undermine the principle of Japan’s postwar labor legislation which has regarded the indirect employment system as “exceptional”, he appealed to the audience to work together to scrap the measure.

Shii also condemned the government’s plan to revise the Labor Standards Act to eliminate the limit on working hours, at present limited to an eight-hour day and 40-hour week, as well as to legalize unpaid overtime. Citing the fact that May Day originated in 1886 when workers in Chicago rose up demanding an eight-hour workday, he called for reinforcing workers’ joint efforts to foil the administration’s plan.

Minamida Masae, a 55-year-old nurse working at a public hospital in Tokyo, took part in the mass rally with a sign printed on her clothes reading “Oppose the right to collective self-defense”. “If authorizing the state to exercise the right to collective self-defense, medical workers and young people would be sent to battlefronts. I cannot tolerate such a thing,” she said.

At the rally, the organizing committee introduced solidarity messages from the Central Union of Agricultural Co-operatives (JA-Zenchu), the National Trade Union Council (Zenrokyo), 13 foreign trade unions, and three international labor organizations.