Japan labor law guidelines to require companies to curb holiday work
(Mainichi Japan)
Japan's labor ministry has laid out a plan for guidelines in the Labor Standards Act that would require companies to make efforts to rein in work on holidays.
The plan was presented during a subcommittee meeting of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare's labor policy council on April 27. The subcommittee broadly agreed to the plan.
Work hours on holidays are not subject to the yearly 720-hour upper limit for overtime work to be introduced by the government, which creates a loophole, some observers say. Under its plan, the government could warn companies that do not curb work on holidays, but the requirement would not be legally binding.
The government plans to submit a bill to revise the Labor Standards Act, including a cap on overtime work hours, during an extraordinary Diet session this coming fall. In the meantime, the labor ministry aims to compile guidelines to go with the legislation by fiscal 2019 in time for the revised law's enforcement.
Under the government's current plan for regulation of overtime, hours worked on holidays (at least one day a week under the Labor Standards Act) are counted under the "less than 100 hours a month" rule and an additional rule stating that average monthly overtime over periods of two to six months must not exceed 80 hours. However, in the plan to limit overtime hours to "720 or less a year," work hours on holidays are not counted.
