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2014 June 25 - July 1 [LABOR]
Does Abe’s growth strategy really support women’s participation in workforce? |
According to the ministry’s survey on equal employment, in 2013, the ratio of the male workforce that took child-raising leave slightly increased by 0.14 percentage points to 2.03% from the previous year. Despite the first increase in two years, the survey results clearly reveal the low percentage of men taking childcare leave.
On the other hand, the ratio of working mothers applying for a leave of absence for childcare decreased for the second consecutive years by 7.3 percentage points to 76.3% from a year earlier. The figure reflected a big drop in the percentage of women workers at small- and medium-sized enterprises. The reason for the big drop may be because fixed-term contract workers hesitated to use the company’s childcare leave program and full-time workers gave up taking the leave due to a labor shortage.
On the day after the Labor Ministry’s data was released, the Abe Cabinet approved a new growth strategy which regards more women’s participation in the workforce as an essential part of economic growth.
The strategy states that in order to encourage women to enter the workforce, it is necessary to strengthen support for women’s family responsibilities such as childcare. For example, as a measure to resolve the issue of children waiting to enter childcare facilities, the strategy states that the government will create a system allowing unlicensed childcare assistants who finish a simple training course to work at such facilities. However, what parents are demanding is the construction of more authorized childcare centers and better working conditions for qualified childcare workers.
Japanese Communist Party Secretariat Head Yamashita Yoshiki on June 24 issued a statement and said that Abe’s growth strategy provides no concrete measures to change the current women-unfriendly work environment.
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