Japan

The ITUC affiliate in Japan is the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (JTUC-Rengo).
Legal
Freedom of association / Right to organise
Anti-Union discrimination
No information available.
Barriers to the establishment of organisations
- Other formalities or requirements which excessively delay or substantially impair the free establishment of organisations
- The system of trade union registration for local public employees requires separate unions to be created in each municipality.
Categories of workers prohibited or limited from forming or joining a union, or from holding a union office
- Armed forces
- Police
- Other civil servants and public employees
- There are limitations particularly for civil service employees and, to a lesser extent, for employees of state-run companies and private companies that are considered to have "higher social responsibility", i.e., those that provide essential services. Employees in firefighting services, penal institutions and the Maritime Safety Agency are not allowed to organise.
Right to collective bargaining
Limitations or ban on collective bargaining in certain sectors
- Armed forces
- Police
- Other civil servants and public employees
- Administrative and clerical workers do not have the right to bargain or conclude collective agreements at the local or national level. Their wages are set by law and/or regulations, partly based on recommendations issued by the National Personnel Authority and local personnel commissions. Employees in firefighting services, penal institutions and the Maritime Safety Agency do not have the right to bargain collectively.
- Other categories
- The worker dispatching is a system under which the dispatching business operator dispatches the workers employed by the company to a client (counter party), thus supplying labor services that will be under the command of the client. Under this system, the employment, wages and other working conditions of the dispatched workers are effectively determined by a dispatch contract concluded between the dispatching business operator and the client, and at the time of the finalization of the price negotiation and so on of the dispatch contract, the client, as the demand side, stands in an advantageous position. Thus, for the stability and improvement of the working conditions of dispatched workers, it is necessary for the trade unions to which the dispatched workers belong to exercise their right to organize vis-à-vis the client. The Worker Dispatching Act, however, has no regulation stipulating the obligation of the client to accede to collective bargaining, and the nature of the client in its status as employer of dispatched workers is ambiguous.
Right to strike
Undermining of the recourse to strike actions or their effectiveness
- Excessive civil or penal sanctions for workers and unions involved in non-authorised strike
strike
The most common form of industrial action, a strike is a concerted stoppage of work by employees for a limited period of time. Can assume a wide variety of forms.
See general strike, intermittent strike, rotating strike, sit-down strike, sympathy strike, wildcat strike actions - Trade union leaders who incite strike action in the public sector can be dismissed and fined or imprisoned for up to three years under provisions of the National Public Service Employee Law and the Local Public Service Employee Law.
Limitations or ban on strikes in certain sectors
- Undue restrictions for “public servants”
- All public employees are banned from striking. The government has transformed public agencies into Independent Administrative Institutions (IAIs), which it classifies as “organisationally independent from the government”. Two types of IAIs have been created: “specified IAIs”, where the employees are national public employees, and “non-specified IAIs”, where the employees are not considered as public servants. Although all IAI employees have the right to organise and bargain collectively, only workers in the latter category are guaranteed the right to strike.
In practice
The Japanese Trade Union Confederation (JTUC-RENGO) reports having witnessed many cases of discrimination against union members or activists. Companies are frequently refusing to bargain in good faith. In several cases management delayed negotiations with a view to block the bargaining process. Financial information about the companies that is essential for the bargaining process is only delivered after unions exert pressure. Concluded collective agreements are rarely extended and only apply to union members. Moreover, strikes in the public sector are forbidden, and incitation to strike
strike
The most common form of industrial action, a strike is a concerted stoppage of work by employees for a limited period of time. Can assume a wide variety of forms.
See general strike, intermittent strike, rotating strike, sit-down strike, sympathy strike, wildcat strike
by public employees is illegal and punished with up to three years imprisonment. The Japan Confederation of Railway Workers’ Unions (JCRWU) reports being harassed by the Police and the Government on grounds of its alleged relations with the political group Kakumaru.
Under this programme, unskilled workers mostly from developing countries receive a one-year visa (renewable for up to three years) to come to Japan for technical training. Labour laws are applied to the trainees and they are granted the right to organise and so on, but it is reported that in some cases the trainees are sent to Japan by the dispatching organisation in their home country on the condition that they will not exercise the right to organise.
Furthermore, since the existence of an accepting organisation is a precondition for the trainees to enter Japan, the position of the accepting organisation is overwhelmingly advantageous compared to that of the trainees.
As a result, the strongly-positioned accepting organisations restrict the right to organise, and there are many cases in which trainees have been made to work long hours under very inadequate working conditions.
In addition, in the first stage of the technical training, the trainees are supposed to undergo a Japanese language course, but the judgment concerning whether the trainees are workers under the Trade Union Act during the period of the course is ambiguous.