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Litigation and courts have been important arbiters of labour policy reforms aimed at redressing Japan's growing social inequality. This article considers seven lawsuits brought by non-regular workers, who sought to use Article 20 of the 2012 Labour Contracts Act to gain equal pay for equal work. All seven cases reached Japan's Supreme Court amid Abe Shinzō's 2018 labour reforms. The Court's interpretations reaffirmed employer discretion in categorising employees as a reasonable principle, albeit one which limits the law's power to redress wage inequality. However, the Court also found the non-provision of various minor benefits to be unreasonable. These outcomes evince a pattern in which litigation marginally transforms reformed labour policy into institutional support for greater equality of compensation and benefits between workers of different statuses. More than advancing equal pay for equal work, the outcomes of these cases support recent government-industry campaigns to boost productivity by encouraging increased use of job-based treatment and diversifying Japan's employment system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study on blue-collar temporary agency workers in Japan uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to revisit the Marxist problem of surplus appropriation; that is, why do temp workers work as hard as they do, when management has little to offer in return? Existing literature has provided two answers of 'coercion' and 'consent.' This study attempts to bridge the debate by employing Bourdieu and Wacquant's concepts of practical sense and illusio. Workers entering the factory as novices initially made conscious efforts to master the specific bodily schemes necessary to survive on an insecure job. It was in the process of mastering the practical knowledge of factory work that temp workers came to be taken in, and by the game. Temp workers came to experience joy in investing their mind and body in the tasks, for they saw themselves reflected in the good job they did. Yet workers were not wholehearted believers in the game; they questioned their commitment and deeply suffered from reflecting on the poor treatment they continued to receive despite their commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the particular circumstances of temporary dispatched workers ( haken rōdōsha) and a feature of their job insecurity as one facet of the growing inequality in contemporary Japanese society, focusing on the relative ease with which these workers are dismissed both legally and in practice. By contrasting with other more familiar forms of insecure labor in Japan, the paper examines the triangular relationship involving the three parties that characterize dispatched labor: the user, the employer, and the employee. The Worker Dispatching Act, which was enacted and then deregulated, enabled Japanese corporations to use dispatched workers while securing the capacity to remove them from their workplaces as a business transaction and not within the bounds of an employer-employee relationship. Using the theoretical framework of risk, the paper analyzes the emergence and spread of the triangular labor relationship as risk being shifted from the corporate level to the individual dispatched workers. It examines the consequences of the shift of risk by introducing cases of dismissal from fieldwork conducted during the global recession over the winter of 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical waste poses health hazards, increases the environmental load and is costly to dispose of. To solve the above problems, we applied the hazard analysis and critical control point system (HACCP) to the management of wastes generated from endoscopy. First, the wastes in three hospitals were quantified. The number and weight of waste per case differed significantly among the three hospitals. Second, HACCP was applied to the endoscopy unit of Hospital X for a year. Wastes were segregated into five types and weighed. We found that 25.8% of 'infectious waste' was in fact 'non-infectious waste' and 'non-infectious plastic waste'. The numbers of needles and needle caps did not correspond in two occasions (needle-loss rate: 0.42%). Bacterial counts of the waste container were determined to investigate infection hazard. The counts were 0 cfu/cm2 in all examinations except one occasion. The waste control manifests were reviewed, and all entries were consistent with the waste sent for disposal. In Hospital X where implementation of HACCP was attempted, reduction of environmental load and cutting of disposal cost are anticipated by changing the categories of waste segregation. The results suggest that hospital wastes should be managed more safely by HACCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]