Japan Press Weekly

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2018 August 29 - September 4 [LABOR]

Large corporations’ internal reserves increase by 22 trillion yen while workers’ wages decline

Finance Ministry statistics released on September 3 show that in 2017, large corporations with more than one billion yen in capital increased their internal reserves by 22.4 trillion yen to a record 425.8 trillion yen.

Compared with the previous year, big businesses’ current profit was inflated by 4.8 trillion yen to 57.6 trillion yen, 2.3 times larger than that in 2012 when Prime Minister Abe made his comeback. The remuneration for each board member was 19.3 million yen a year, up 600,000 yen from a year earlier. Meanwhile, workers’ annual income stood at 5.75 million yen on average, down 54,000 yen from the previous year.

Under the Abe government’s economic policy, Abenomics, which provides preferential treatments such as generous tax breaks to large corporations, their earnings continue to grow.

Japanese Communist Party Secretariat Head Koike Akira on the same day at a press conference in the Diet building pointed out that it is unacceptable for big businesses to use their huge profits only for executive salaries and dividends and to accumulate their internal reserves while refusing to give raises to workers.

Koike said, “Economic inequalities keep widening. Under this circumstance, the Abe government plan to raise the consumption tax rate to 10% will further exacerbate the economic imbalance.”

Past related articles:
> Use of just small portion of internal reserves will increase Toyota regular workers’ monthly wages by 20,000 yen [January 12, 2018]
> Large corporations’ internal reserves hit record high while workers’ wages decline [September 2, 2016]