Japan Moves Toward Shorter Workweek

Parliament has taken a modest step toward eventual implementation of the 40-hour workweek for Japanese workers.

Stung by criticism from abroad that Japan’s long working hours and short vacations give Japanese manufacturers an unfair trade advantage, Parliament voted last Friday to revise the Labor Standards Law for the first time since 1947.

The amendment was pushed through by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party with the support of the middle of the road Democratic Socialist Party and the neo-Buddhist Komei (Clean Government) Party.

The revised law provides in principle for a workweek of no more than 46 hours a week beginning next April 1. The revision specifies that the standard workweek--the maximum number of hours that any worker may be required to work without overtime pay--will be shortened at a later time to 44 hours, and eventually to 40, the standard in most of the rest of the advanced industrialized world.

It sets no specific times for those changes and authorizes the Labor Ministry to order them when it sees fit.

During parliamentary deliberation, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone said the government will attempt to enforce a 44-hour week by 1991 and then move to the 40-hour week “as quickly as possible within the first half of the 1990s.”

In the 10-year period that ended in 1985, working hours in most Western nations were on the decline--down about 5% on average. But in Japan, which has the longest working hours in the advanced industrialized world, working hours increased by 1.6%, according to the International Labor Organization.

Government Workers Excluded

The immediate effect of the revised law will be minimal. Companies that employ 299 or fewer workers will be given three years, until April 1, 1991, to adopt the 46-hour week. Companies of this size employ 88% of all salaried workers in Japan.

Only about 260,000 workers--employees of companies with 300 or more workers who still work more than 46 hours a week without overtime pay--will be affected next April.

By 1991, when the exemption for smaller firms is lifted, working hours will be reduced by about 55 hours a year, according to a Labor Ministry estimate. That will still leave workers in private industry putting in 123 hours more a year than their American counterparts now work.

Government workers are not covered by the law. Ninety percent of the people who work for the national government get one Saturday off a month. The other 10% put in a 5 1/2-day week throughout the year. Only this month, a government commission recommended that the national government start a program of two Saturdays a month off as an experiment. Local government workers continue to work every Saturday throughout the year.

A move toward a five-day week started here in the 1960s, but only 6.1% of Japan’s business firms, mostly large companies, have adopted a five-day week throughout the year.

Foot-dragging by the government and by the banks, regarded as pacesetters in these matters, has slowed the movement toward shorter working hours.

Not until last year did banks begin to give employees two Saturdays off a month.

A steady decline in working hours, which had taken place without government pressure, came to a halt with the 1973-74 oil crisis. The downward trend in working hours--from 2,432 hours a year in 1960 to 2,064 in 1975--stopped in 1975. In 1985, the average worker was on the job 2,168 hours a year, including overtime. By comparison, American workers in 1985 put in an average of 1,924 hours, including overtime.

The upshot is that Japanese employees now work the equivalent of six weeks a year more than American workers. Moreover, they are paid only time-and-a-quarter for overtime work. The American standard is time-and-a-half. Parliament did not consider changing a provision in the Labor Standards Law to bring the rate of overtime pay into line with the U.S. standard.

The revised law also outlaws punishment for workers who take the full amount of vacation days to which they are entitled. The average worker in Japan, Labor Ministry statistics show, takes only 7 1/2 days of the annual 15-day vacation to which he or she is entitled. Employers do not permit, and workers seldom ask for, an American-style vacation of three or four weeks.

Last month the president of a large glass-manufacturing company took an unprecedented nine days off and the incident attracted the attention of newspapers here. They described it as a “large-scale vacation.” The vacation had been approved by the company’s board as a way of encouraging employees to take at least a week off.

20-Day Paid Vacations

Last April 24, a government commission was appointed to find ways of restructuring Japan’s economy, to shift it away from reliance on exports. The commission, headed by Haruo Maekawa, a former governor of the Bank of Japan, called for a reduction of working hours and said this was “important for enhancing national standards of living, for stimulating consumption and for maintaining employment.”

It urged that working hours be reduced to about 1,800 hours a year and recommended that workers be given 20-day paid vacations “as soon as possible but not later than the end of the century.”

A provision of the law for a new “flexible time” system was condemned as a ploy to lower labor costs. The system will allow employers to require workers to put in more than eight hours a day without paying overtime as long as working hours are reduced by the same amount of time later. The bill was revised after it was submitted to Parliament to forbid employers to require pregnant women to put in extra hours.

Union leaders also criticized the new law for specifying that workers would be allowed to take only five days of their annual vacations at their own discretion. The remainder, the law specifies, must be taken in accord with agreements to be worked out by labor and management.

Although the average worker is already entitled to 15 days of vacation a year, the new law requires employers to grant a minimum of 10 days of annual leave.

The Japan Federation of Newspaper Workers’ Unions, which paid for advertisements in U.S. newspapers urging American criticism of the Japanese government, also criticized the new law for failing to give workers the right to take sick leaves. Workers, the ads said, now take personal holidays when they get sick.