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Factory, employment agency in Japan must pay for exploiting interns
Officially, they came to Japan for training, but in reality, they were forced to work long hours for little pay. A Japanese court on Monday ordered a sewing company and an employment service to pay 4.4 million yen (52,250 dollars) in damages, ruling that the firms had exploited four Chinese interns. The High Court in…
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Japan, give us a break!
Time after time I’ve been in offices here where people feel under pressure not to take time off, for lunches or anything else. According to a report by Harris Interactive this year, Japanese workers took off an average of 9.3 of their 16.6 legally mandated vacation days. As anyone who works here knows, even that…
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小学校英語どうなる：打ち合わせは「偽装請負」？ 指導助手活用できず 業務委託、派遣で問題
目の前にＡＬＴ（外国語指導助手）がいても、教諭は授業の打ち合わせができない。授業中の指示も禁止。すべてＡＬＴを派遣している請負業者とファクスなどを使ったやりとりでしか伝えられない－－。
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Average hourly minimum wage to rise 17 yen to 730 yen
The nation’s weighted-average hourly minimum wage will rise by 17 yen from the previous year to 730 yen in the current fiscal year that started in April, the largest increase since fiscal 2002 when such wages were first calculated by the hour, the labor ministry said Friday. The Central Minimum Wages Council, a Health, Labor…
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Household income gap hit record in 2008
Japan’s household income gap reached its highest level on record in 2008, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has announced. The so-called Gini coefficient — an indicator used to measure the inequality of income distribution — hit a record 0.5318 in 2008, up 0.0055 points from the previous survey in 2005. The Gini coefficient…
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Gov’t to help foreign residents master Japanese language
The government will help foreign residents master the Japanese language in order to improve their quality of life, its basic guideline on the issue showed Tuesday. “Foreign residents in Japan have difficulties in finding jobs due to their insufficient language capabilities, and more people have faced hardships in their lives,” the guideline, compiled by a…
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New Dissent in Japan Is Loudly Anti-Foreign
The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies. Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in…
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Japan, Germany face less size and clout as anniversary nears
Japan and Germany will celebrate the 150th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties in 2011. Both countries were defeated in World War II but re-emerged strongly from the ashes of war. Over the decades that followed, they became the undisputed economic powerhouses of Asia and Europe. But leaders in both countries may have less reason to…
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Japanese women stand low on corporate ladder 25 yrs after law change
Twenty five years have passed since the Equal Employment Opportunity Law for Men and Women was enacted to fight gender inequality at the workplace. By this time, people might think that a horde of college-educated women are calling the shots as corporate managers. But the latest Kyodo News survey shows that is hardly the case.…
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Japan looks for answers as China surges past
Japan’s GDP slump, and news that China’s economy is now bigger, will intensify the search for answers on turning around the economy. To some, the answer lies offshore. Not in the traditional sense of exporting cars and televisions, but in bringing in new workers from Japan’s rapidly developing neighbours. The Japanese are good at finding…