Japan Press Weekly

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2016 February 3 - 9 [POLITICS]

JCP Horiuchi criticizes Abe for prettifying his policy on zero turnover of employees quitting their jobs to care for aging parents

Japanese Communist Party lawmaker Horiuchi Terufumi on February 8 in a House of Representatives Budget Committee meeting criticized Prime Minister Abe’s policy to seek zero turnover of employees giving up their careers to care for their elderly parents as being blind to reality.

PM Abe has proclaimed that one of the major targets of the so-called three “new arrows” of his economic policies is to decrease the number of workers who quit jobs for nursing care to zero by improving nursing care services.

JCP Horiuchi said that under a situation where more than 100,000 workers annually leave their jobs to take care of their aging family members at home, PM Abe’s zero turnover policy will benefit only 15,000 workers.

Horiuchi went on to point out that while 520,000 elderly people are currently on the waiting lists for admission to public nursing-care homes, the government policy will open the doors for only 150,000 people to enter those facilities.

The JCP lawmaker pointed out that more than 4,000 small nursing-care homes were closed in association with cuts in the state remuneration paid to nursing-care facilities in April 2015. He also noted that the average monthly income of nursing-care workers is 100,000 yen lower than that of workers in other areas of employment.

Horiuchi said that in order to prevent people from quitting their jobs to become their parents’ care givers, it is necessary to solve the issue of shortages in care workers and facilities through a drastic increase in workers’ wages and in state funding support to care facilities.

Past related articles:
> Half of special nursing-care homes in Tokyo are shorthanded [January 7, 2015]
> ‘Revision’ of nursing care insurance program will force more workers to quit their jobs [June 17, 2014]