Reasonable to introduce ‘post-hourly wage’ system for specified job types
THE FOLLOWING editorial appeared in Monday’s Yomiuri Shimbun:
Continual efforts should be made to establish cooperative relations among government, labour and management so that work style reforms do not stagnate.
The government, the Japan Business Federation ( Keidanren) and the Japanese Trade Union Confederation ( Rengo) did not reach an agreement on the introduction of a “post-hourly wage” system, in which highincome professional workers are exempt from work-hour regulations.
This is because Rengo, which had expressed a willingness to conditionally accept such an introduction at one point, reversed its stance. As Rengo has long opposed the new system - saying it would “promote long working hours” - it was forced to withdraw its endorsement due to strong protests against the new system within the organisation. A plan to promote the Rengo general secretary, who led the trilateral cooperation, to president of the organisation was also cancelled.
Rengo’s leadership bears a great responsibility for breaching trust both in and outside the organisation.
The government plans to submit a bill to revise the Labour Standards Law, which would include the introduction of the new system, to the extraordinary Diet session this autumn, after strengthening measures to protect workers’ health, which is another Rengo demand to the government.
The current law stipulates working hours to be “eight hours a day and 40 hours a week,” requiring employers to pay extra to employees whose work hours exceed this standard and to those who work late at night and on holidays.
This stipulation would not be applied to the new system. Wages would be decided based on the actual results of labour and the ability of workers, without reference to the number of hours worked. Under the existing discretionary labour system, wages are based on the premise that employees are deemed to work for a certain amount of time, not on actual hours worked. But the discretionary labour system is different from the new system in that the former allows for extra pay.
In jobs that require planning and creative abilities, workers’ accomplishments do not necessarily correspond to how many hours they work.
It is clear that such jobs are not suited to the existing system in which workers who loosely work long overtime hours get higher wages, rather than those who produce results in a short time. These types of jobs are increasing.
It is reasonable for salaries to be decoupled from working hours for specified job types on condition that individual workers grant consent. Productivity improvements can also be expected. — WP-Bloomberg