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Panel proposes eliminating 8-hour day on clerks and engineers

The Health, Labor, and Welfare Ministry's research panel on the working hour system in the future on January 25 produced a report proposing to introduce a new system in which white-collar workers in clerical and engineering jobs that satisfy certain conditions should not be regulated by the 8-hour day.

This new framework of exempting workers in certain categories from the application of legal regulations on work hours in the name of "self-regulation" will exclude target groups of workers from legal regulations concerning work hours, rest breaks, and night work, except for regulations on legal holidays. They won't be paid for any extra overtime or night work they do. Employers are freed from the duty of taking records of how many hours they actually worked.

The panel report sets forth the following conditions to be met for workers to be exempted from working time regulations. Their jobs require no specific instructions on how to fulfill duties and how to use the time, allow discretion on the part of workers about the amount of work they do; their wages are based on their achievement and ability, without directly reflecting the number of hours they work; an annual income of over a certain level is already ensured to them.

However, the range of workers covered by this system can be enlarged if corporations opt for it, because the report states that realistic talks between labor and management can agree on specifically how many workers are covered.

The Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) in June 2005 published a proposal urging that any white-collar worker with an annual income of over 4 million yen apply for being exempted from work hour regulations.

The "8-hour work day and 40-hour work week" stipulated by the Labor Standards Law is the principle of work regulations to guarantee decent family life necessary for human beings. The new system proposed in the name of "self-regulation" has the danger of undermining this principle. It will worsen Japanese society, already marked with such internationally unparalleled and aberrant phenomena of long work hours, death from overwork (karoshi) and suicide from overwork, and prevailing overtime work without pay.
- Akahata, January 28, 2006