Open door for foreign workers in Japan

Seniors take a break on benches at a temple in Sugamo district in Tokyo. The country's population is shrinking, and more than 20 per cent of its citizens aged 65 or older. (Issei Kato/Reuters)

Japan will open its doors for at least 345,000 foreign workers. That being so while the workforce ages.

It should be noted that previously Japan was doing everything possible to keep foreign workers away. Despite this, he is now forced to accept hundreds of thousands of them. In fact, the country's parliament is scheduled to approve new legislation that will dramatically increase the number of low-skilled and low-wage workers allowed in the country. Summing this way to the inescapable pressure of the demography.

On the other hand, the population of Japan fell by 0.3 percent to 125.2 million as the country registered only 946,060 births. This was established as the lowest number since 1899. Likewise, the number of available jobs far exceeds the number of workers.

What is the result of it?

It is established as a result that Shinzo Abe's conservative government is reluctantly reforming the nation's immigration laws to allow another 345,000 workers into the country over the next five years.

Similarly, what is a fact is that the number of foreign workers in Japan has doubled since 2000. Thus, 1.3 million people work mostly in sectors such as retail, hospitality, agriculture, and manufacturing, or working on construction projects as infrastructure for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

An important factor to highlight is that the legislation creates two new categories of visas.

The same categories are divided in such a way

The first, for unskilled workers, requires that the worker leave after a maximum of five years and does not allow the entry of any member of the family. While the second, is aimed at those who occupy high-tech positions, allows families to accompany and offers a potential path to citizenship, but only after a decade, and provided they do not commit crimes.

In the same way, it is well known that reality has always been that the majority ends up filling the kind of jobs that nobody else wants. These jobs range from dishwashers to convenience store employees, to the dangerous job of decontaminating the site of the Fukushima reactor disaster. To make such jobs worse, most of the same jobs pay badly, and foreign citizens complain of abuse and harassment.

For their part, unions have been trying to recruit workers and offer them more protection. Despite this, they face strong opposition from employers who often leave hiring, firing, and payments to subcontractors.

Read more.

Source: Jonathon Gatehouse | CBC News