Lesson:

WorkStyle Reform

Japanese politics has become interesting again! There’s much going on with Moritomo Gakuen and Mr. Abe’s ‘work style reform’ debacle. Japanese are overworked and underpaid. Working yourself to death is so familiar in Japan that the Japanese have a single word for it – karoshi. Mr. Abe, the current (2018) Prime Minister of Japan (for the time being at least), has made labour reform one of his ‘three arrows’ to bring Japan’s economy out of the doldrums. It seems, however, that the only ones who support his ‘workstyle reform’ at the moment are the business lobby. Workers are fearful that these reforms will put Japanese workers on a slippery slope to losing their workplace benefits. All around the world, workers are afraid that technology will take away their jobs or regulate them to part-time status. Will Japanese workers face a double-whammy of technology and workstyle reforms? PS, I’m updating this lesson in 2022. Mr. Abe is gone, the Moritomo Gakuen scandal has been forgotten, and Japan never figured out what Abe’s ‘workstyle reform’ was supposed to be. The Japanese remain overworked and grossly underpaid.