March 9, 1999

Kiyoshi SASAMORI
General Secretary
Japanese Trade Union Confederation (JTUC-RENGO)

1. On March 9, the government presented to the Diet a bill to amend the Occupational Safety and Health Law. This bill was formulated in response to a supplementary resolution concerning the restrictions on late night work, etc., which were adopted during the vote on the Labor Standards Law as amended in the extraordinary Diet session last year. This supplementary resolution also confirmed the Diet's intention to amend the Occupational Safety and Health Law from the viewpoint of securing good health conditions for the working public. At the same time, concerning the Law, the issue of straightening out "discrepancies in occupational health and safety" at smaller enterprises (see below) had remained an important carry-over task from the last amendments to the Law (in 1966). And this issue was the biggest point of dispute in considerations before the Central Labor Standards Council.
2. There are three basic problems with the current bill. First, there are questions regarding the effectiveness of the measures addressed at securing good health conditions for workers serving late night shifts. According to the bill, workers who serve late night shift can voluntarily undergo physical checkups, in addition to the current twice-a-year regular mandatory checkups, and depending on the result of the checkup, can be eligible for relief measures such as restrictions on the frequency of late night work. However, the aim of a forthcoming Labor Ministry ordinance pursuant to the amended Law which has been presented to the Council. It will be that the scope of the voluntary physical checkup should remain within the framework of existing regular checkups, that the opinions of diagnosticians should not be taken into account, and that specific criteria for restrictions on late night work will not be presented. If this is indeed the intention, it is difficult to understand how the objectives of the designed amendments to the Law could be achieved, even though there could be certain financial support measures. And the amended Law would be criticized as incorporating merely nominal amendments which are aimed only at putting the language of "reductions in frequency of late night work" to the text of the Law.
3. Second, the bill does not contain any corrective measures against "discrepancies in occupational health and safety" at smaller enterprises, an issue that is the largest problem of the existing Occupational Safety and Health Law. Presently, the Law exempts enterprises with fewer than 50 employees from the requirements of establishing an in-house occupational health and safety committee and hiring a consultant physician. While more than half of total workers' accidents involving deaths and injuries, and some 80% of all fatal accidents, occur at these smaller enterprises. This became a major issue in the amendment process of the Law in 1966. And the competent government authority once suggested that it had the intention to expand the coverage of these requirements to enterprises "with 30 or more employees," but later withdrew the suggestion and decided to carry over the issue to the next amendment. Thus, this problem must be considered as the highest priority in amendments to the Law this time.
4. The third problem concerns control measures over chemical compounds. The bill can be praised for stipulating the requirement to prepare data sheets (MSDS) for hazardous materials, giving their characteristics and warning messages. However, more critically, there are only 117 directly regulated hazardous materials in Japan, far less than the some 1,000 in the U.S. Looking at the occurrence of fatal accidents due to non-regulated chemical compounds, we conclude that it is absolutely necessary to expand the number of directly regulated materials, based on the actual state of occupational health and safety hazards presented by chemicals.