TentCity – forces government to recognize plight of jobless and homeless

In the first days of January 2009 when most Japanese were home celebrating the New Year, a ‘Tent City for the Homeless’ was organized in Hibiya Park, Tokyo, right in front of the Labour Ministry. It was offered as a place where jobless workers could come for shelter, food and consultation services on job-related or other issues they might have.

It was organized by various unions and lawyers. It sprang out of a rally in December, when several unions got together to protest Japan’s Dispatch Law and demanded that the government regulate temporary employment contracts.

The layoffs of contract and temporary workers, especially in the export-oriented auto and electronics sectors, increased after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008. Since Japan’s Dispatch Law was deregulated, temp workers lost job security and ended up getting laid off en masse as companies slashed output.

One of the major problems is that most temporary jobs came with company housing, and the workers lost homes when their jobs were cut. Their pay was never good enough to save enough money to move to a new apartment right away. In the Tent City, consultation booths were set up to advise on employment and welfare assistance, so they could get monthly welfare payments while looking for jobs and apartments.

Tent City for the Homeless, organized by Labornet Japan, Anti-Poverty Network and other groups               Source: Youtube

Very soon after the Tent City opened, the unemployment situation continued to worsen, and the government was forced to recognize it. Every day, more media covered the action, the news spread, more jobless came for help, and more volunteers arrived to offer their help. The organizers appealed directly to the government to open up some of the public facilities for the people who lost their homes and jobs because they were running out of tents and space.

The problem of employment and housing being tied became apparent and a couple of efforts to provide affordable housing have sprung out of this. One is a union that rented out an apartment building to offer cheaper housing to mainly its members.

Tens of thousands of workers are expected to lose their jobs in the first half of 2009. The government has forecasted that the world’s second largest economy will have zero growth in the year ending March 2010.

Big firms turn down wage demands

Major electronics firms Wednesday rejected their labor unions’ demands for basic monthly wage hikes greatly in excess of last year’s demand for an improvement in pay scales.

It was the first time in four years that major manufacturers turned down labor’s demand for increases in their workers’ basic monthly wages.

The responses by the major manufacturers in the annual spring wage-hike negotiations, known as the shunto, was due mainly to the drastic economic slump, observers said.

An increasing number of electrical appliance manufacturers are seeking to freeze employees’ regular wages–tantamount to a wage cut–as demonstrated by electronics firms such as Hitachi Ltd.’s proposing that it postpone automatic pay hikes for about six months.

This is the first time there have been corporate efforts to freeze regular wage hikes since the annual spring labor negotiations in 2002, when the nation’s economy was in a deflationary recession. The move is likely to affect other industries, according to the observers.

For the first time in eight years the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo) sought across-the-board pay scale hikes for its members.

Labor unions at major automakers demanded a uniform monthly pay scale hike of 4,000 yen, and those at major electronics companies demanded a uniform monthly pay scale hike of 4,500 yen–figures far above those of the previous year.

Some major manufacturers including Panasonic Corp. and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. responded to their unions–members of the Japanese Electric, Electronic and Information Unions–with an offer to implement regular wage hikes, if the unions would forgo a raise in basic pay scale. Other companies - Fujitsu, NEC, Toshiba, Sanyo Electric Co. - offered raising or freezing regular wages, and freezing automatic wage hikes for six months to a year.

In the automobile industry, Toyota suggested cutting regular wage hikes after its labor union submitted its demands, but later said it would hike regular wages, saying cuts in regular pay raises might affect employees’ morale. On the other hand, the company plans to pay bonuses equal to five months’ wages plus 100,000 yen, worth an average of 1.86 million yen, slightly below the union demand of five months’ wages plus 200,000 yen, worth an average of 1.98 million yen.