By the end of June 2018, Shinzo Abe’s cabinet would piece together a new pro-growth program that it hopes would streamline Japan’s human resources policy by n unprecedented scale and scope: Revisions of numerous decades-old regulations relating to workplace practices such as work hours, discriminations against non-regular workers and gender equality, plus, as already written, shifting to proactive-immigration..
The bottom-line of the work style reform program is to address (again, as written earlier) deepening labor shortages, acutely felt for real already by large to small businesses and set to get more serious over coming years as the country’s population is projected to sink below 100 million from 127 million now over the next couple of decades. With that in the backdrop, the Keidanren (the Japan business federation) had been prodding the prime minister to act, and in September 2016, the government launched a policy council, the Council for the Realization of Work Style Reform made up mostly of Keidanren-friendly representatives and Abe cabinet members.
The program is part of the ‘Abenomics’ initiative that Abe launched in 2013 to bail Japan out of the deflationary spiral by achieving an yet-to-ben realized 2-percent inflation target with rigorous monetary policy accommodations, fiscal mobilization, and structural reform and deregulation.
Nominal worker pays and the closely-watch job availability ratio (1.0 is an even level, and below that means there are more jobs than workers want) have been increasing over those intervening years, but the Japanese people are lukewarm to welcoming those improvements and instead many argue that the pay rises are being offset by rising taxes, healthcare , childcare, pension contributions and other public costs.
Mollifying the public angst and frustration about work is vital for securing quality workforces and sustainable growth, OECD had told Japan, and that’s one reason Keidanren proposed the program to Abe. Working in tandem, the Abe government and Keidanren had decided that Japan needed to streamline and update its decades-old (or centuries-old) labor practices to one that befits the modern era.
Lifetime employment and worker seniority are labor policies having been practiced for more than four centuries in Japan. It’s the foundation that have generated a stable stream of loyal and quality workforces albeit perhaps short of creativity and drove Japan to the global economic and trade stardom in the 1980s. In drafting the work style reform program, government and Keidanren officials have identified creativity as the No. 1 worker property and relegated the centuries-old traits behind. They recommended that Japan introduce a ‘discretionary work’ system as the benchmark of new work regimes for workers engaged in R&D, programming, media producers and other so-called skilled professionals whose performances should be measured with results, not by hours worked.
Abe had argued with government data that this ‘high professional’ scheme would help boost productivity of skilled workers while helping reduce work hours. Yet, in response to revelations that the data was fabricated by government officials, compounded by the ‘karoshi’ work-to-death of an employee of Nomura Real Estate Co., the arm of Nomura Securities Co., he was forced to withdraw it from labor law amendment bills in 2017. Effectively, the legislation lost its luster.
A year after the pandemonium, workers and businesses alike are doing the soul-searching for what work life reform is about. A number of companies responded to questions by the Prospect that they were in the midst of debating and executing reforms in phases but said that there were little they can disclose at this moment.
One thing that can be deduced from talking with workers, perusing media reports and so on is that fewer Japanese workers look happy than in the past, yet work places where coordination, cooperation, and cohabitation are emphasized – ironically, they are the Japan until the mid-1980s – are brimming with willing workers.
Back during Japan’s go-go era of 1950s to 1980s, workers volunteered to work overtime, odd hours and tolerated commuter trains into which station ‘pushers’ squeezed passengers into packed cars. But this is the 21stcentury so people won’t accept such conditions, yet there are workplaces that weigh on work reforms with the objective of enhancing worker happiness, much of it done in close collaboration of management and workers.
Uematu Co., Ltd. of Fukui (http://www.uematu-works.co.jp) is one. It’s a fabric dying manufacturer with 45 employees. It doesn’t have time cards, and trust employees to be in charge of manufacturing, quality control, R&D, and pretty much every part of corporate management. Uematu’s corporate credo, according to its website, is to ‘contribute to the well-being’ of its employees). And its management philosophy is to ‘offer value to customers based on the spirit of altruism’ and ‘nurturing the team work with employees who are cheerful, understand the spirit of goodwill, and praise other people.’
Of course, Uematu employees do not work overtime, and even so, it’s highly popular product, anti-pollen masks, priced at 650 yen ($6.00) a piece, is selling like hot cake.
Such a private-sector initiative should be what motivates Japanese workers to enjoy both work and private life, instead of rigid rules based on laws and regulations.
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