Welfare ministry proposes easing child care leave prerequisites

Amid a surge in nonregular workers, the welfare ministry on Thursday proposed drastically easing the current rigid requirement for child care leave that prevents many mothers from returning to the workforce.

The proposal, made to labor policy experts, was unveiled Thursday during a meeting of the Labor Policy Council and comes amid mounting calls to improve the treatment of nonregular workers.

Internal affairs ministry statistics show such workers constitute nearly 40 percent of the total workforce and 60 percent of all female employees.

The proposal also followed a survey released Wednesday showing that nearly half of all female temporary workers have experienced harassment during their pregnancy and application for child care leave.

Many women working on a nonregular basis are unable to rejoin the workforce after childbirth due to difficulties in qualifying for up to one year of child care leave.

A mere 4 percent were able to return to work after taking such leave, according to 2010 statistics from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

The ministry proposed relaxing current prerequisites for the leave by scrapping a rule that says a successful applicant must be expected to remain on the payroll after their child turns 1. It also suggested easing another rule that stipulates the same applicant must be deemed unlikely to lose their employment contract before the child turns 2.

“As the number of nonregular workers is on the rise, there are more calls to make it easier for them to take child care leave. The public is increasingly of the opinion that they should be granted such leave, too,” a welfare ministry official, who asked to remain anonymous, said after the meeting.

Last month Matahara Net, a group fighting discrimination against pregnant workers, petitioned the ministry to relax maternity leave requirements, which it says have traditionally given unscrupulous employers leeway to deny nonregular workers child care leave on their own terms.

On a related note, the panel also examined the outcome of the first-ever survey conducted by the ministry on discrimination against pregnant workers — a phenomenon known as maternity harassment, or matahara in Japanese, that critics say is still rampant in Japan’s male-dominated corporate society.

The survey, carried out on some 3,500 female employees aged 25 to 44 nationwide, found that 48.7 percent of temporary workers had experienced such harassment, mostly in the forms of verbal abuse and layoffs based on their pregnancy and application for child care leave. This compared to 21.8 percent of full-time workers.

The harassment was inflicted on the victims mostly by their male immediate superiors, followed by other male bosses, female immediate superiors and female co-workers. The verbal abuse to which they were subjected included comments such as “you’re causing us trouble” and “you’d better quit.”