Market Newsletter : Japan Trying to Get Workers Out of Factories and Into Stores : To ease trade relations, overtime work is discouraged, and Tokyo is pumping $48 billion into the economy.

What do you do when your employees work too hard?

Nissan Motors has come up with a novel approach--it turns the lights off at its headquarters building here in order to encourage people to go home on time. Stay beyond 6:30 p.m. without special permission on “no overtime day,” and you’ll be working in the dark.

The innovation is part of a companywide effort to eventually eliminate all overtime work. Right now it’s limited to Thursdays, when, a company spokesman claims, almost all of the 5,000 headquarters employees are now gone by the appointed hour.

Clearly, however, there is more to be done. Nissan’s workers each put in an average of 2,155 hours during the fiscal year that ended last March despite generous annual vacations of up to four weeks. That’s still 195 hours more than the company’s target, 139 hours more than the national average and 255 hours more than the typical U.S. worker.

But Nissan had better watch out for its Japanese competitors. According to the Japan Autoworkers Federation, the industry average work time is 2,250 hours a year--the equivalent of nearly 12 full days more than Nissan’s factory hands put in.

Japanese workers get only 1.25 times their normal pay rate for overtime compared to the standard “time and a half” in America. Still, according to the Labor Ministry, the average Japanese worker puts in 175 hours of overtime a year.

The ministry set a goal three years ago of reducing average hours to 1,800 per year by 1992. Having missed the mark by a wide margin, it recently slipped the target date to the fiscal year ending in March, 1997.

Cutting the average workweek is meant in part to appease trading partners such as the United States, aggravated by Japan’s bulging trade surplus--which is expected to total at least $120 billion in fiscal 1992.

Another approach: plans to boost the economy at home. More domestic demand usually leads to an increase in imports.

Inspired partly by the annual economic summit in Munich, Germany, of the Group of Seven advanced industrialized democracies--and partly by Japan’s July 26 election for the upper house of Parliament--the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has announced plans to give the economy a 6-trillion-yen ($48-billion) shot in the arm.

In 1987, the government approved a similar pump-priming supplementary budget that launched a three-year boom. Because Japan’s gross national product has increased since then, 6 trillion yen now represents a proportionately smaller economic stimulant than it did five years ago. Still, U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady has welcomed the move, saying it will “ensure that Japan meets its 1992 economic growth target of 3.5%.”

In fact, the package won’t be enacted before October--probably too late to achieve that rate.

U.S. trade negotiators have repeatedly cited high prices in Japan as evidence of a need for reform. But one company is struggling to eliminate one of Japan’s biggest bargains: the 8-cent phone call.

The standard, three-minute rate of 10 yen, or 8 cents, for a cross-town call here has not changed for 16 years--much to the chagrin of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT).

The company has argued for years that fees for its deficit-ridden inner-city phone service, which accounts for two-thirds of all phone calls in Japan, must be raised in order to reduce charges for long-distance phone calls, which are three times more expensive than the average in the United States.

NTT asked the Postal and Telecommunications Ministry to approve a 20% increase in local phone rates last December, but without success. And now its whole case may have been undermined by the company’s recent report that, for the first time, its local phone business showed an operating profit in fiscal 1991. Reductions in the work force and gains in income from local access fees paid by new long-distance carriers prompted the turnabout.

Meanwhile, a new “opportunity” of sorts is opening up for foreigners at NTT.

Transformed from government to private ownership in 1985, NTT quickly became the Cinderella of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Brokers persuaded even homemakers who had never been involved in the stock market to buy. “The Ministry of Finance stands behind the stocks--you can’t lose” was the sales pitch. From an initial price of 1,600,000 yen ($12,800) a share, NTT shot up to a record high of 3,180,000 yen ($25,440) a share in 1987.

But because they decreed telecommunications essential to national security, ruling Liberal Democratic Party politicians and Finance Ministry bureaucrats banned foreigners from buying NTT stock.

Now, however, Cinderella’s coach has turned into a pumpkin. While prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange have tumbled by nearly 60% since the Dec. 31, 1989, peak, NTT’s stock has crashed 80%. Last week, it was selling at 627,000 yen ($5,016), only slightly above its record low.

So the cash-starved Finance Ministry, which still owns two-thirds of NTT’s shares, and the ruling party supported a legislative amendment lifting the ban on foreign purchases of the stock. Beginning Aug. 1, foreigners will for the first time be permitted to buy up to 20% of the company’s shares.

And over at the Fair Trade Commission there’s a crackdown--of sorts--on collusion, which constitutes “a grave infringement upon taxpayers,” according to agency head Setsuo Umezawa.

The immediate targets are construction firms suspected of colluding in bidding for public works contracts in Saitama prefecture, west of Tokyo. Last May, a year after commission investigators raided construction firm offices, the anti-monopoly watchdog agency let the firms off with a warning.

But now it turns out this may be the “mother of all warnings.” The boards of directors of 66 companies have been ordered to adopt resolutions pledging to refrain from violating the Anti-Monopoly Law. And they also have been ordered to submit by Sept. 15 signed statements from all employees pledging that they will not engage in collusive practices.

The 66 companies employ more than 100,000 people.