Govt to ease law on construction workers
Archiveless Gomiuri Shimbun
To help prevent unemployment in the slumping construction industry, the government will submit to the next Diet session a bill to revise the law to improve the working conditions of construction workers by allowing construction firms to dispatch redundant employees to other companies when business is slow, it was learned Tuesday.
The government is set to introduce the employment system as early as autumn.
Currently, the Temporary Staffing Services Law forbids construction, port transportation and security companies from dispatching employees to other companies. This prohibition arose out of past cases in which construction workers were forced to work in poor environments and were stripped off their wages by brokers.
The law was enacted in 1986 to counter increasing outsourcing by companies to cut personnel costs. Initially the law stipulated that workers could be dispatched only if they were in one of 16 specified professions, such as interpreter or secretary.
In 1999, the target was expanded to most professions, and the manufacturing industry was included in the system in March 2004.
It is expected to be applied to the construction industry through associations of construction companies in prefectures, which will draw up plans for each dispatch, including the names of the companies that dispatch and accept workers, the period of dispatch and the number of workers to be dispatched. Approval for each project will be issued by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry. The term for each dispatch project will be limited to be three years at most.
Members of different construction associations would not be allowed to dispatch workers to each other, nor would they be allowed to accept workers from other industries.
Since the bursting of the bubble economy, the construction industry as a whole has suffered from excess employment, mainly due to the drastic decrease in public works projects. But some companies are suffering a shortage of skilled workers due to aging.
According to a Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry survey last summer, 25 percent of companies surveyed said they needed more skilled workers, while 8 percent said they had excess workers.
The government expects to fill this gap by introducing the new system.
Anyone want to guess what these mysterious "other companies" are?
