A government-proposed bill to achieve what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe calls “work-style reform” by amending the Labor Standards Law and other rules will be on the way. Curbing the chronically long work hours put in by corporate employees and closing the steep wage gap between regular and irregular workers were advocated by most political parties in the campaign for the Lower House election last Sunday. The parties and lawmakers differ a great deal, however, on the details in the legislation promoted by the Abe administration. All relevant parties, including labor unions and people at large, should scrutinize the legislation to determine whether it will actually improve working conditions, especially whether it will serve to prevent excessive work hours that imperil their health.

The bill was to have been submitted to the Diet during the last legislative session, but it was postponed when Abe dissolved the Lower House in late September. Its four main pillars are placing a legal cap on overtime hours; introduction of a system to lift work-hour regulations on certain highly skilled and highly paid professionals; expanding the discretionary working system, in which employees will be regarded as having worked a certain number of hours and paid an accordingly fixed wage no matter how long or short they actually work; and measures that aim for the "equal work, equal pay" principle in which workers engaged in the same work are paid the same irrespective of their employment status.

The 2015 suicide of a stressed out and overworked 24-year-old employee of Dentsu Inc., for which the advertising giant was fined ¥500,000 earlier this month by the Tokyo Summary Court, roused renewed social criticism of the practices prevalent in Japanese firms that allow overwork. The proposed legislation would in principle restrict an employee's overtime to 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year. That limit, however, could be extended to 100 hours a month during busy season and 720 hours a year under an agreement between management and that company's labor union. Even though it would be the first legal limit on maximum overtime hours, critics say the cap could effectively condone a level of overtime work that threatens employee health. The Dentsu employee was found to have been working 105 hours of overtime a month before she developed depression and killed herself.