Japan Pushes Shorter Work Hours

Labor Minister Toshio Yamaguchi says it is difficult to persuade the Japanese to enjoy more leisure time.

“I’ve been working 15 or 16 hours a day trying to shorten working hours,” he told a group of foreign correspondents recently, describing a nationwide campaign by the Labor Ministry to promote a 40-hour work week and full vacations. He added that he took only three days of summer vacation.

For Yamaguchi, the issue of shortening working hours to promote more time off has assumed emergency proportions, in terms of Japan’s effort to fight protectionism in the rest of the world and in terms of ensuring enough jobs for Japan’s rapidly aging work force.

“I have been saying in speeches around the country,” he said, “that tensions between Japan and the rest of the world are now growing with the same momentum that existed in 1940 (just before World War II). The people in those days endured a very bad life to promote military aggression. Now, Japan’s outdated social systems are forcing people to forgo enjoying their personal lives to promote exports.”

Yamaguchi said he tells Japanese repeatedly that if Japan does not adjust to the rest of the world, it will suffer the political equivalent--in the form of retaliatory U.S. trade legislation--of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II.

‘Political A-Bomb’ Must Be Avoided

“Why couldn’t the Japanese people have become peaceful enough not to have had those bombs dropped on them?” Yamaguchi said. “It’s the same situation today in our trade conflicts. Before a political A-bomb is dropped, we must adopt a posture of cooperation.”

In the field of labor, he said, that means adopting a 40-hour work week and taking full vacations.

Firms with 30 or more workers now put in about 30 hours (nearly four whole working days) a year more than American workers, including vacation time not taken. Workers at smaller firms usually toil even longer hours.

Yamaguchi said he has been putting in 16-hour days taking his campaign around the country in the form of Labor Ministry panel discussions. Representatives of local business and labor groups are brought together with Labor Ministry officials, he said, to discuss wages, working hours, vacations, retirement and equal opportunity for women.

Most of Japan’s big companies involved in exporting have already adopted the 40-hour week, though many of their workers still do not take all the paid vacation days that they are entitled to, he said.

The work-week problem focuses on the multitude of small firms, many having 10 workers or less, he said.

“There are 20 million Japanese working in small enterprises,” he said. “On top of that, about 1 million shops are operated by just a husband and wife, with no employees.”

For this kind of business, he said, limiting working hours “is a matter of life and death.”

Yamaguchi said the Labor Ministry will propose an amendment next year to the Labor Standards Law to force employers to adopt the 40-hour week in stages. The law now requires that overtime be paid after 48 hours; the amendment would reduce that time to 45 hours, then 42 and finally 40, he said. “It will probably take four to five years to get to 40 hours,” he said.

Yamaguchi said there will be no attempt to amend the law to force employers to pay overtime at the rate of time-and-a-half, the American standard. Japanese workers are customarily paid time-and-a-quarter for overtime.

Even government workers have a long way to go to reach the 40-hour week. They now get only one Saturday off a month.

Yamaguchi said that in urging workers to take all the time off due them, he is advocating that all industries give unbroken vacations during “Golden Week,” the period between April 29 and May 5, when three national holidays occur.

Focus on Schoolchildren

A plea to make May 4 a new national holiday was rejected by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s Cabinet, and the Education Ministry turned down an appeal from Yamaguchi to make the entire period a vacation for schoolchildren, who now spend at least half a day in the classroom on Saturday.

“We must teach Japanese from childhood the custom of having free time,” Yamaguchi said.

He said his Golden Week campaign has already produced results. Until last year, he said, fewer than 50% of Japan’s big companies let workers take off the entire seven-day period, but this year 74% of them declared weeklong holidays.

The Japan Travel Bureau, he said, reported that 65 million Japanese left home for some kind of trip during Golden Week this year and spent an estimated $3 billion. That, he said, helped spur more growth at home, which Japan needs to overcome trade friction caused by export-led growth.

More leisure also is needed to promote a kind of work sharing to create jobs for the elderly, Yamaguchi said.

“The Japan National Railways’ problem of carrying 100,000 excess workers on its payroll is often cited as a serious issue, but a far greater problem is ensuring jobs for the 5 million workers between the age of 55 and 65,” he said.

Raise Retirement Age to 60

Large firms are gradually raising the mandatory retirement age to 60--traditionally, it has been 55--but the Labor Ministry recognizes a need to promote 65 as the retirement age, Yamaguchi said. In the planned amendment to the Labor Standards Law next year, however, the ministry will propose to raise it only to 60 to avoid coercion, he said.

The increasing desire of women to work is also eating into the job market, Yamaguchi said, and this adds another element of urgency to the promotion of more leisure time to create more jobs.

“Even today,” he said, “an ethic of senyu koraku (struggle first, enjoy later) remains a national characteristic. . . . I am criticized as a labor minister who is trying to transform Japanese diligence into laziness, but if we do nothing about Japanese diligence, even greater problems will occur in future international trade friction.”

He predicts no overnight change.

“I think,” he said, “that we can do a great deal to change the Japanese consciousness about the value of leisure--if we carry out a campaign for 10 years or so.”