Liberal Japan

Article:
Migration News Vol. 14 No. 1: Japan, Korea

Source:
Migration News

1.

Foreign trainees work in Japan for one year; they can remain two more years as advanced trainees at higher wages. Trainees often work long hours for below-minimum wages, earning about $15,000 a year while the minimum wage yields $28,000 a year.

A Justice Ministry investigation reported that 9,500 foreign trainees had absconded between 2000 and 2006. Some abscond because they can earn more as unauthorized workers, especially since many Japanese firms do not pay even the lower-than-minimum wages due trainees. A 2005 survey found that 80 percent of the 730 firms with foreign trainees were violating the Labor Standards Law and the Minimum Wages Law.

Some 83,319 foreign trainees were admitted to Japan in 2005, including 55,150 from China. Most are employed in small manufacturing companies and farms, and they are supposed to receive training to compensate for their low wages. However, many are required to work long hours, and if they complain their employers threaten to fire them, which leads to their removal from Japan. Reformers want to convert trainees to guest workers who would be subject to labor laws, and reform the Japan International Training Cooperation Organization, which administers the trainee program, to increase monitoring of trainee conditions.

Comment: Great statistics. As I read this, the information is coming directly from the Ministry of Justice.

2.

The OECD’s July 2006 survey of Japan included a section on migrant workers (pp189-192), noting that postwar Japan has not been a country of significant immigration or emigration. In 2002, the 180,000 legal foreign workers in Japan, a third entertainers, were 0.3 percent of the labor force, and adding in descendants of Japanese emigrants (234,000), foreign students who work part time (83,000) and trainees (46,000), and unauthorized migrants (221,000), brings the total to 760,000, or 1.1 percent of the labor force. The OECD urged Japan to increase female labor force participation by changing tax laws, reducing discrimination and increasing childcare facilities.

Comment: Useful statistics. The OECD might want to urge Japan to increase female labor, but as I understand it the percentage of females already working is quite high. Moreover, if people want to increase the fertility rate, encouraging more females to work may not help. I’m not sure. Ultimately, I don’t like it when the government meddles into the personal lives of people in such a manner as to encourage or discourage them to have children.