Japan to review foreign trainee programmes
Play
The Justice Ministry of Japan will review state-assisted job-training programmes for foreigners starting early next month to prevent irregularities such as unpaid and low wages for trainees.
To review the programme, the ministry will set up a subcommittee of the justice minister’s private advisory panel on immigration-control policies.
Among the issues the subpanel will discuss are whether to extend the training period, currently limited to three years, and how to strengthen supervision of organisations accepting foreign trainees.
Improved government supervision is considered necessary to address poor work conditions in which some foreign trainees have not been paid outstanding wages or have been forced to work for wages below the legal minimum level.
By as early as December next year, the subpanel will compile its final report, which the ministry will later use to re-examine the training programme.
Meanwhile, the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) and others say that foreign trainees cannot acquire sufficient job skills in three years.
Such business groups have urged the government to extend the training period to a maximum of five years and allow trainees to receive additional instruction after they complete the initial training.
The issue has already been discussed by such Japanese governmental entities as the Council for Regulatory Reform and the Industrial Competitiveness Council, with some council members voicing a need to extend the training period.
Foreign trainees are also said to have been forced to work under poor conditions, and some have called for programme regulations to be toughened or for the scheme to be terminated altogether.
In June, the Japan Federation of Bar Associations demanded that the programme be abolished, citing cases in which trainees were suspected of not being paid or being forced to work unreasonably long hours.
The programmes are schemes in which foreigners receive on-the-job training in such industries as agriculture and fisheries.
The Japanese government launched the programme in 1993 to contribute to the international community by sharing the skills and knowledge of Japanese workers with trainees mainly from developing countries.
In the first of the programme’s two tracks, companies accept workers for their overseas units as Japan-based trainees.
In the second track, umbrella associations of small and mid-size companies and those of agricultural organisations accept trainees and introduce them to member companies and farming households.
According to the ministry, last year there were about 150,000 foreign trainees in the programme and about 70 per cent of them were from China.
