STATEMENTS

Comment on the Lifestyle White Paper

26 March, 2002

Tadayoshi KUSANO
General Secretary
RENGO

  1. Today, the government released the white paper on lifestyles for the fiscal 2001 with a subtitle "Family, Lifestyle and the Structural Reform". It is suitable that the white paper reviews lifestyles from the viewpoint of "how to work", "child bringing up, care, and support", and "practical use of IT" through examining "families". However, it is not acceptable that its arguments and analyses only propagandize Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's structural reform plan, which proposes a labour system that promotes more diverse ways of working.

    Actual people's life is frightened uneasily by the unemployment, worries about bringing up children and their education and gets exhausted with care. Furthermore, community-based mutual support has been increasingly weakened. The current reform plan of the government does not lay out policies to overcome the uneasiness and worry of the people.

  2. The white paper advocates shortening of working hours and more flexible full-time work, selection of part-time work, outsourcing and/or labour saving of domestic work, including child-rearing.

    However, it does not indicate measures to respond to wage gap, discriminatory treatments and the instability of part-time work. Although the government blows its own trumpet, claiming that the regulatory reform in the labour market is sure to enable men and women to work in a more flexible way on equal conditions and find a new job more easily, its eyes are tuned away from worsened working conditions and increased unemployment.

  3. In the area of child-rearing and care, the importance of "improving nurseries", "expanding the participation of family members" and "establishing the system of child-rearing leaves". However, the white paper does not daringly analyze that long working or portal-to-portal hours of husbands hinder their participation in housework and child-rearing. It insists that the Child-care and Nursing-care Leave Law has automatically enable men and women to make work compatible with family responsibilities, but a reality is that very few men make full use of the leaves.

  4. It is very important to analyze problems of families and lifestyles from the viewpoint of a family. However, while the white paper the highest priority to a value that a full life should be realized based on his/her own choice, it fails to assess how public policies have been supportive to create an atmosphere to realize a full life. The white paper should not propagandize public policies, but should make precise analyses on their effectiveness and results.

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