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2018 January 10 - 16 [LABOR]

Use of just small portion of internal reserves will increase Toyota regular workers’ monthly wages by 20,000 yen

January 12, 2018
Union calculations have revealed that Toyota and many other large corporations can offer a monthly pay raise of 20,000 yen with the use of a just small portion of their internal reserves.

Large corporations are making huge profits and accumulating their retained earnings. Seeking to address the growth in poverty and economic disparity, the National Confederation of Trade Unions (Zenroren) in this year’s spring wage talks will demand a 20,000-yen increase in monthly pay for regular workers and a 150-yen hike in the hourly wage for non-regular workers.

The Zenroren-affiliated Japan Federation of National Public Service Employees’ Unions (Kokko-roren) calculated what percentage of the internal reserves is necessary to realize the 20,000-yen raise based on Zenroren’s data on 127 major corporations. Kokko-roren found that the Zenroren demand can be achieved at 96 of the 127 companies by using less than 3% of their internal reserves.

Toyota Motor, by tapping into only 0.68% of its 21-trillion-yen internal reserves, can provide a monthly wage increase of 20,000 yen to its 364,000 regular employees and an hourly wage increase of 150 yen to 86,000 non-regular employees. Nissan Motor can do the same for its workers with 0.85% of its accumulated funds of 5.9 trillion yen.

Concerning Toray Industries whose adviser is Japan Business Federation Chairman Sakakibara Sadayuki, the company has 921.4 billion yen in internal reserves and 1.7% of those funds is enough to increase its regular employees’ monthly pay by 20,000 yen. For Sony and Panasonic, the necessary percentages are 1.6% of their internal reserves of 2.7 trillion yen and 3.4% of 2.5 trillion yen, respectively.

Past related articles:
> Large corporations’ internal reserves exceed 400 trillion yen while workers’ wages remain stagnant [September 2, 2017]
> Use of 1% of internal reserves will create 490,000 new jobs [January 26, 2017]

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