Suicides, Homeless Ranks to Swell in Japan as Firms Slash Jobs (Bloomberg.com)

Horrifying news....

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Homeless and suicide numbers in Japan may spike as manufacturers including Sony Corp., Panasonic Corp. and Honda Motor Co. fire thousands of workers to cut costs amid the country’s worst recession since World War II, unions said.

Some 400,000 temporary workers will lose their jobs by March, according to the Japan Manufacturing Outsourcing Association. Japan’s unemployment rate jumped the most in 41 years in December, to 4.4 percent from 3.9 percent a month earlier, as companies laid off an estimated 88,000 temporary staff.

Changes in labor law since 1999 have left a third of Japan’s workforce employed on short-term contracts offering little security and no unemployment benefits. Wages are often less than welfare payments and many temporary workers live in company dormitories, leaving newly unemployed also homeless, unions and activists say.“Getting fired in Japan can also mean losing a place to live,” said Makoto Yuasa, head of Moyai, a support group for the jobless and homeless. “There’s not enough security or protection for people who lose their jobs.”Then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi extended changes to labor laws in 2004 to let carmakers and other manufacturers use more temporary workers to help the country recover from almost a decade of economic stagnation. The policy undermined Japan’s so- called lifetime employment system, letting companies hire and fire to meet production needs.Economy GrowsThe changes coincided with Japan’s longest postwar economic expansion from February 2002 to October 2007. Excluding financial and insurance firms, corporate profits rose 58 percent between fiscal years 2001 and 2007, according to the Ministry of Finance.Companies cut costs by hiring from staffing agencies that handle recruitment and training and pay any needed pension and social security contributions. The rolls of non-regular workers, including temporary and part-time staff, rose to 34.5 percent of Japan’s 55.3 million employed in September from 24.0 percent in 1999, labor ministry data show.As the number of temporary workers increased, so did poverty levels as 4.3 million, or 8.1 percent of all Japanese households, earned less than 1 million yen ($11,200) in 2007, up from 3.1 million in 2001, according to ministry data. Workers on minimum wage in Tokyo earn 122,560 yen a month for a 40-hour week, less than the 167,170 yen per month paid to welfare households.“It’s totally unstable, unlike anywhere else in the world,” Makoto Kawazoe, an official with the Tokyo Young Contingent Workers Union, said yesterday. “You can’t treat labor like raw materials and expect it to conform to a ‘just in time’ manufacturing system. Labor is live human beings who have to eat and survive.”A Different RecessionThe new face of Japan’s job market means the country will also experience this recession in a different way, according to Martin Schulz, a senior economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo. Companies that used to cut wages when times were bad can now fire workers to offset declining earnings, he said.Over the New Year, about 500 recently fired temporary workers set up a “tent village” in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park, two blocks from the Emperor’s palace, before the government moved them into welfare housing on Jan. 5th.There’s no sign the layoffs will abate. Honda Motor Co. said it will axe all its 3,100 temporary jobs in April. NEC Corp. will cut its payroll by 20,000 by 2010 and Panasonic, the world’s largest maker of consumer electronics, said yesterday it will cut 15,000 jobs including full-time positions.Jobless SuicidesEconomic woes in Japan historically herald an increase in people taking their own lives in a society that already sees a suicide about every 15 minutes. Fifty-seven percent of the 33,093 who killed themselves in 2007 were jobless, police figures show.“For political leaders the suicide rate is a sharp warning over policies,” Koichi Kato, a lawmaker for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said in an interview this week.Prime Minister Taro Aso said on Jan. 28 the government will ease regulations barring non-regular workers from unemployment coverage. For example, Japan’s labor ministry plans to reduce the qualification period for benefits to six months in the same job from 12, starting April 1.The one thing Japan can’t do is turn back the clock and ban companies from taking on temporary workers, Naohiro Yashiro, a professor in labor economics at the International Christian University in Tokyo, said in an interview yesterday.“Returning to stricter hiring regulations won’t benefit workers, rather it would put further restrictions on a labor market already suffering from the economic downturn,” he said. “The government needs to make unemployment insurance not just compulsory but also beneficial to short-term workers.‘‘Lay-offs are like accidents -- you need a secure, flat payment to ensure that you’ll get through it.’’ Link to the original article -> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=asGHc_c3.BOY------------------------------------------------Seems to me that Japan has made a big mistake in economic strategy. ant it's almost too late to get back to what used to be. I really think that Japanese people have different visions for many things from North Americans. We don't have to adopt their way of employment and working systems, or we should not. What the Japanese government doing now is simply trying to cut costs and increase production by incorporating more competitive working environment, without reducing the "well-known" one of the longest working hours in the world. The Japanese economy could collapse even further, considering current low working efficiency and huge decline of the labour force. What we should learn from Western countries is that "work is just one part of life, so do your job and be competitive within the "8hours", and after that, enjoy your life. It's very interesting to hear from friends in other Asian countries that they also work over-time quite often, and it's becoming a cultural norm. "Hard-worker" is one of the characteristics foreigners imagine about Japanese people.Well,it's not a bad impression, is it? And I think partly that's true, that's how our ancestors have sacrificed their life time for making Japan one of the economically and technologically strongest countries in the world since the end of the World War 2. It's time now, to learn from the past and to make a change for better society.