Effective measures needed to solve difficulties finding jobs for new graduates

Japan Press Weekly

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Effective measures needed to solve difficulties finding jobs for new graduates

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

The Science Council of Japan has recently proposed to the Education, Science and Technology Ministry that graduates of universities and colleges should be treated as new graduates for at least three years after graduation to ease their difficulty in getting jobs.

It was the education ministry that commissioned the council with working out a proposition for improving college education. Given the present circumstances in which job searches take up much effort and time on the part of students, making it difficult to educate them as scheduled, the council went further and has proposed a review in the process of students getting jobs.

According to the education ministry, only 60.8 % of those who graduated last March got jobs, the percentage showing a drop for two years in a row. Further, the drop from FY 2009, 7.6 percentage points, is the biggest drop on record. The number of young people who neither got jobs nor pursued graduate education was 87,000, accounting for 16% of the graduates.

As students in their junior year have to start their job-hunting early to cover a long period of intense searching, seminars show poor attendance, and they have to start writing their theses without mastering in their major subjects.

Corporate rules of recruitment, in which this year's graduates who remain jobless, are not allowed to apply for the next year's jobs, makes the matter more difficult. Graduates feel that their career ends if they fail to get full-time regular jobs the year they graduate. Some of them choose to pay the high tuition and remain in the same status as seniors in order to find jobs with a new-graduate status.

Rules and regulations should be established to make students' job-seeking tasks not interfere with their learning; they should be treated as new graduates for three years after their graduation; and their job seeking efforts should be financially aided. These measures need to be put into practice as soon as possible to make the situation better.

Another point to note is that the increasing number of non-regular jobs at large corporations is partly to blame for the decline of job offers to new graduates, in addition to the economic downturn.

The deregulations in labor law, which caused non-regular unstable jobs to dramatically increase, need to be reviewed so that the "all-jobs-are-regular" principle should prevail in society. It is necessary to increase the number of new employment opportunities as well as to control the extraordinarily long working hours of many workers.

The Japanese Communist Party last April proposed policies calling for rules and regulations for graduates finding jobs to help them take their first steps as workers in society. The JCP is working on this question through talks with college administrators and hearing from students, and is trying to influence the national and local governments.

- Akahata, August 22, 2010