As the population declines and Japan faces a super-aging society, the nation must secure enough workers and maintain its social and economic vitality. To achieve this, the nation should speed up efforts to create an environment in which a diverse range of human resources can fully exercise their abilities and people can work with gusto.
An expert study group of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has released a draft report on employment policies that includes workforce projections for 2040. These are the first such projections covering the period until the nation's elderly population is expected to peak.
If the nation's economic growth rate remains near zero and labor participation by women and elderly people does not improve, the workforce will shrink by 20 percent, from 65.30 million people in 2017 to 52.45 million in 2040. This is a drop of 12.85 million.
These figures once again bring into sharp relief the seriousness of the "national crisis" confronting Japan.
However, if the nation can achieve higher economic growth and greater labor participation, the extent of this decline could be capped at 8 percent -- a drop of 5.06 million workers.
In addition to using every means available to increase the number of workers, it also is vital that companies boost productivity to offset any shortfall in employees. The public and private sectors must tackle these problems with a sense of urgency.
As people live longer lives, their working careers also will naturally lengthen. The nation needs to craft a society in which everyone can, with peace of mind, keep working in a manner that fits their own circumstances at the time. This also will be important for making the social security system sustainable.
Various work styles needed
Increasing the choices of work styles available to employees and rectifying long working hours so people can better balance their jobs with raising children, caring for family members or receiving medical care -- these steps will lead to a variety of human resources becoming active in society. Flexible arrangements that let even permanent full-time employees choose their working hours and where they work should be expanded.
Eliminating unfair disparities in treatment between employees will be essential for enabling them to freely choose how they work. Equal pay for equal work, part of planned work style reforms, will be gradually introduced from fiscal 2020. Companies should actively get involved in these efforts.
Reviews of the social security and tax systems are also necessary. An income tax deduction based on a spouse's income level is among the factors suppressing the supply of women as labor. The system under which an elderly person's pension is reduced depending on wages earned if they work also should be reconsidered.
Many employees in the generation who started working during the so-called employment ice age, when the job market was bleak, are now in their 40s and have not been able to find steady jobs. If their situation continues, about 40 years from now there could be a flood of elderly people living in difficult circumstances. Strong support should be given to efforts to hire, as permanent full-time employees, people who have spent a long time in unstable jobs.
Despite these steps, a shrinking workforce will be unavoidable. It will become even more important to boost the skills of each worker and boost productivity. The government must beef up public vocational training involving technical innovations such as artificial intelligence and bolster support for companies' efforts to nurture human resources.
More foreign laborers will be accepted into Japan from April. While this will help to alleviate the worker shortage, the government should not pin excessive hopes on this and slacken its other countermeasures.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Jan. 25, 2019)
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