The Abe administration has targeted some labor regulations that it views as obstacles to economic growth. The revision to the law on temporary dispatch workers, which was aborted in the last Diet session when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dissolved the Lower House, will likely be tabled again if he survives the Dec. 14 general election, even though his Liberal Democratic Party's campaign promise does not directly mention the bill. Also under discussion by a government panel is a proposal to exempt some corporate employees from work-hour regulations and compensate them on the basis of job performance rather than the hours they work. Voters should scrutinize where each party stands on these labor issues from the viewpoint of improving the overall well-being of workers.

The 1986 law on the dispatch of temporary workers bans the use of such workers for the same job for more than three years with the exception of 26 types of occupations that require special skills, such as interpretation and secretarial work. The bill proposed by the Abe administration to amend the law was aimed at abolishing the three-year limit by allowing companies to use temporary staff in the same job indefinitely as long as they replace individual workers every three years. Although the bill requires management to listen to the opinions of their labor unions when they want to use temporary staff for longer than three years, the unions are not empowered to override management decisions.

The business community, which has relied increasingly on an irregular workforce while cutting back on the employment of full-time workers, has been pushing for easing regulations on the use of temporary workers. But opposition parties sharply criticized the bill, charging that the amendment would prompt businesses to permanently replace full-time employees with temporary workers. The bill was eventually scrapped after deliberations on it in the Diet stalled over erroneous explanations by labor minister Yasuhisa Shiozaki.