Tokyo, April 18, 2019—On Planet Earth where the rich gets richer and the big gets bigger by ravaging the ecosystem, workers increasingly are working like ants by sacrificing their well-being even though they are supposedly protected against overwork and low pays. Freelance, or independent contractors, are among those scraping by with ultra-low wages earned for assignments given them through sprouting cloud-sourcing businesses that the Shinzo Abe government is espousing as a new work-life style. Now is the time for Japan to establish worker safety nets for independent contractors.
On April 12, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare’ released to its study commission to work out key points on work style reform of like-occupations (Koyo ruiji no hatarakikata ni kakaru ronnten seiri to nikansuru kenntoukai. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/newpage_01811.html) a report that showed that as many as 1.7 million workers in Japan are cloud-sourcing business-relying independent contract workers (https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11911500/000501194.pdf). It was believed to be the first such data released by the Japanese government. Of the 1.7 million of them, 1.3 million positioned their work as key income sources while 400,000 considered their cloud-sourced work as side jobs. Japan’s total work population is 66.5 million, of which independent contractors and self-employed account for 6.5 million, thus the 1.7 million number is a formidable workforce.
The Tokyo Shimbun newspaper on April 14 quoted in a feature article a female worker allegedly in her 50s saying that when she had registered on-line for work with an intermediary, the company asked her a work to compile an outline of a television drama in 1,000 Japanese characters for posting onto a website – for 0.7 yen per word of Japanese. That meant she earned 700 yen ($6.00) for work that kept her at PC for 3-1/2 hours, or less than 200 yen an hour. But that was not the end of her sacrifice: the intermediary raked in 140 yen out of that 700 yen, the newspaper reported. Worse, she could not get paid the 560 yen (700 yen minus 140 yen) since the sum was below the 3,000 yen threshold for the company to pay to an independent contractor.
The work-style reform is one of Abe’s ‘3 arrow’ policies: flexible monetary policy by the Bank of Japan, timely fiscal mobilization, and policy to stimulate private-sector growth. The labor reform, the Abe cabinet claims, is beneficial for diversifying work-styles. On the contrary, this policy clearly is burdening workers, causing a plethora of problems between intermediaries that give assignments and workers such as late, or no payments, unilateral pay reductions, the newspaper reported.
Editing, translating, and like-kind jobs are being threatened by AI-driven computers, so the long downward-spiraling of white collar worker pays is not surprising. A 69-year-old former Japanese national reporter for a European news agency quit his full-time work as a translator for a Tokyo Olympic Game promo company. The reason: he was told that his hourly pay would go down to 1,200 yen ($11.00) from 1,600 yen, effective April 1, 2019, the beginning of a new Japanese fiscal year.
The newspaper quoted labor lawyer Yoshihito Kawaakami as saying that Japan has entered an era in which even unskilled workers can succeed at work, but the society should not tolerate unjust compensations and offer basic worker safety nets.
Toshio Aritake