Japan Press Weekly

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2015 April 22 - 28 [LABOR]

Labor Ministry encourages ruling parties to relax rules on use of temps

Japanese Communist Party parliamentarian Koike Akira revealed on April 23 that the Labor Ministry has secretly persuaded lawmakers from the ruling parties to hurry to revise the Worker Dispatch Law in accordance with a request from the temporary staffing industry.

In an Upper House Labor Committee session, Koike showed an internal document which was supposedly used for persuasion. Labor Minister Shiozaki Yasuhisa acknowledged that officials of the ministry had drawn up the papers.

The Worker Dispatch Law, which was revised in 2012, stipulates that if a company accepting temporary workers uses them in violation of the law, the company shall be considered to have offered those workers contracts of direct employment. This provision will come into effect in October this year.

The staffing service industry has put pressure on the ministry to help to block the enforcement of this provision. The labor authorities then created the document to urge legislators from governing parties to take action to amend the act. The papers note that unless the law is revised by the end of September, labor disputes would take place frequently and temporary staffing agencies would suffer a “serious blow”.

In March, the Abe government submitted to the Diet a bill to revise the Worker Dispatch Law. It intends to lift the existing limits on a period of time and job categories allowed to use agency workers.

Koike harshly criticized both the ministry and the ruling parties for trying to legalize unlawful labor practices.


Past related article:
> Adverse revision of Worker Dispatch Law discarded [November 24, 2014]