SNA (Tokyo) — The labor union I represent, Tozen Union, this year marked its decennial anniversary–ten years since its founding on April 25, 2010.

We launched under a cloud of uncertainty and with fewer than ninety members, but have more than quadrupled in size since to over 420 today. Through the twists and turns of Tozen Union’s first decade, we combined our strength, tried all sorts of tactics to fight unfair employers, and to build truly equal relations between labor and management.

Tozen Union has members from over thirty countries, who speak a broad range of mother tongues. We have six dedicated organizers and work every day to build. Of course, any growth is a gift from our organizers, but this year’s supergrowth also speaks to how things have become so grim that workers straight up need to band together. So, although we acknowledge our growing strength, we cannot really celebrate. There is work to do.

This decennial gives me a chance to look back at conditions for workers in Japan more generally over the past ten years.

In 2010, foreign technical interns were finally recognized as workers under labor law, a step forward in the struggle to rescue these quasi-slaves who then worked at 300 yen per hour (well below minimum wage) and suffered countless human rights abuses. The systemic changes, including to the law, came about in part thanks to the heroic efforts of Tozen Union lawyer Shoichi Ibusuki. The change in their legal status led to near universal expectation that the foreign technical intern system would head toward normalization.

But ten years later, and we still hear horror stories about employers confiscating the passports and residence cards of their workers; long work hours and short sleep; and bosses who throw griping interns into a car to the airport and then force them onto a flight back to their home country. In 2010, most victims were Chinese, but now Vietnamese hold the top spot in terms of numbers.

Not a few interns escape (the fact that they must ‘escape’ their work site says something about the nature of this quasi-slavery). They escape and become undocumented, subject to arrest and worse.

Recognizing them as workers has failed to stop the abuse. With the master/slave dynamic, and violence and the treatment of workers as objects, there is no path to a solution other than abolishing the foreign technical intern system.

2013 started the clock on the new five-year rule that had been legislated a couple of years earlier. This rule gave those on fixed-term contracts the chance to escape the endless cycle of contract renewals after five years by converting their own employment to permanent (muki) employees. This means far more job security since it’s difficult to fire a permanent employee.

Much of the labor movement praised this new job security mechanism as a bold first step. But we at Tozen criticized the change.

Over 90% of Tozen members work on fixed-term contracts with very little job security. We figured many employers would do whatever they could to avoid the mechanism. They would fire you before you reached five years. When you start to work at a new company, they will just tell you that you cannot work here for more than five years, again evading the terrifying prospect of their workers having job security.

For management, the amendment means more “mobility” of workers–i.e. they won’t get too entrenched, increase their wages, form unions, etc. For workers, it means less job security and lower wages.

The five-year rule (Article 18 of the Labor Contracts Act) has kept us busy in countless court cases and labor commission investigations. If we could turn back the clock ten years, we should have fought harder against the five-year rule.

In 2019, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s much touted “workplace reforms” (hatarakikata kaikaku) began. Abe called for an end to “irregular” employment; for creating a society that offers women and persons with disabilities many different options on how to work. Despite all the plaudits for Abe’s workplace reforms, as if they would make the lives of workers much better and freer, the reality is quite different.

The reforms were created by amending a large number of laws, but the main three crucial points were a cap on overtime hours, forced paid leave, and the principle of same work, same pay.

The notions ring pleasant to the ears, but the legal changes are so entangled in legal loopholes that it is impossible not to doubt the government’s professed concern for reducing Japan’s long work hour crisis.

Before the forced paid leave law came into force, the average worker took five of their guaranteed allotted days out of between ten to twenty available. If the new law’s purpose was to increase the number of days taken freely as paid leave, the government could have focused on that. Instead they passed a law that gives employers the right to force workers to take paid leave if they don’t take any.

So, they solved the part of the problem that wasn’t a problem–the five days. Only now, your boss could in effect force you to take paid leave when he or she wants you to. Before you could take the days freely; now we see the chance for employers to tell you when to take them. What was sold as helping workers take paid leave turns out to be restricting them from taking paid leave.

Same work, same-pay is also a nice principle, but any hope that workers will be able use Article 8 of the Act on Improvement of Employment Management for Part-Time Workers to redress unfair pay disparities was strangled in the crib by two Supreme Court verdicts delivered on October 13, 2020. Both cases involved women on a contingent contract doing the same work for less pay as their regular employee counterparts.

That Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has said only that he is carrying on Abenomics suggests a dark, dreary road ahead for workers in Japan. Another way to put it is that we labor unionists have our work cut out for us… and a busy decade ahead.

For breaking news, follow on Twitter @ShingetsuNews