Part-time working women are fighting uphill battle

By Mieko Takenobu, Asahi Shimbun, 8 May 1996

More and more people are working for shorter hours but at more than one job. Behind this phenomenon are efforts by employers to reduce the number of the full-time staff on their payrolls and to replace them with part-timers, contract workers or temporary personnel sent from an agency.

However, a big disparity exists between these free-lancers and full-time staff in terms of wages per hour, and eligibility to enrol in insurance and other benefits. There have been some active moves lately to demand minimum working conditions for part-timers as well.

Women are particularly feeling the effects of this disparity. Since one-third of women working in companies these days are part-timers, there has been a move among those who are not full-time workers to create a union together with regular staff.

The Women's Union Tokyo, a union established by women, was inaugurated a year ago, and now has about 130 members, including part-time, full-time, and contract workers. Their ages range from 19 to 65.

One of the issues the union is now dealing with is the distinction in some companies between officially-hired employees on the regular payroll and non-full-time status employees.

A union member, Kiyoko Fujiwara (fictitious name), 37, a saleswoman for an advertising agency in Tokyo, was suddenly notified in April 1994 that she would be designated a contract worker starting that year. That meant she would be renewing her contract every year, and her fixed yearly salary would be reduced to 2.8 million yen.

She complied because she had not been hired right after graduation, and she was not getting any benefits from the seniority system anyway.

The economy went sluggish, however, and her income went down by 1 million yen. She had been earning 4.5 million yen until the previous year. Driven into a corner, she joined the women's union. Her company at first did not understand the problem, saying that these days, people work under diversified employment systems. But after lengthy negotiations, her employer finally agreed last year to raise her fixed salary to 3.9 million yen.

A staff member of the union, Keiko Tani, is concerned that more and more companies are thinking that they can revise their employees' wages just by renaming their job titles.

Companies have an implicit desire to lower their full-time workers' wages down to the level of part-timers in order to cut labor costs as much as possible.

At one of the biggest supermarket chain operators, Seiyu Ltd., more than half of the total employees' work hours are attributed to part-time workers.

Hiromichi Ito, a spokesman for Seiyu's personnel department, says, We'd like to hire more part-timers. In the long run, we will probably have two categories of employees. Not full-time versus part-time workers, but instead, those who work by the hour and those who earn income from the fruits of their efforts regardless of the hours they work.

An assistant teacher at Osaka University of Economics, Hiroyuki Ida, says, Americans and Europeans are trying to reduce the distinction between official staff workers and non-full-time-staff workers by raising the non-staff workers' working conditions and the hourly wages up to the staff workers' level. But in Japan, on the contrary, they tend to lower staff workers' standards to those of non-staff workers.

Need multiple jobs

Ida warns that people may end up having to work longer hours, if this situation is left as it is, as witnessed in the case of some part-time workers who have to assume multiple jobs.

Eiko Iwami, 34, of Suginami Ward, Tokyo, has three jobs; on four days of the week, she teaches Japanese at a language school in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo; on another day, she works at a recycled clothing shop and the remaining one day, at a coffee shop in Kanda. She makes a yearly income of about 1.5 million yen from the three jobs.

Iwami shares an apartment with her sister and pays half the rent, but after deductions from her pay for national pension and national health insurance, she barely can make both ends meet. She would be eligible for unemployment insurance, if she worked all these hours at one workplace.

Iwami says there should be a system to guarantee minimum rights for part-time workers as well, so they don't have to cling to any one company.

Sumiko Yamanaka (fictitious name), 44, of Arakawa Ward, Tokyo, works part-time at a medium-sized printing company for 8! hours, five days of the week at 800 yen per hour, and as a waitress at a chain restaurant after dinner four nights a week. She had been fired in 1993 by a law office where she had worked for 20 years as a full-time employee.

Yamanaka is divorced and has to look after three children. She currently makes about 2.3 million yen, which is less than one-third of what she used to make at the law firm. By working at a restaurant, she manages to make a little more than 3 million yen. She worked more than 3,000 hours last year—she says she is constantly deprived of sleep.

Another Arakawa Ward resident, Reiko Kawano (fictitious name), 50, is also divorced and has two children. She works for a recycled paper material company during the day for 150,000 yen per month, and works at a chain restaurant six nights a week. She manages to earn just about what she used to make when she was working as a full-time employee before.

Kazuko Sakai, the secretary-general of Tokyo Union, which is a part-time workers' labor union, says part-time workers have a heavier financial burden because they have no employer to pay for their insurance, transportation or wages during vacation.

Sakai says the eligiblity of unemployment insurance should depend on one's combined work hours, and proposes a new system to guarantee overtime pay for hours in excess of a certain number of work hours.