Human Resources

August 2002

The Ministry of health is asking for 1.04 trillion Yen in the fiscal 2003 national budget to support child-rearing to curb the declining birth rate. Of the total, 223 billion Yen would go to paying personnel to travel to municipalities across Japan to gather information on child-rearing and provide the data to parents. The information would cover topics such as day-care facilities, groups of parents with small children and helpful services provided by nonprofit organizations．The ministry is also considering setting up child-rearing support panels in all areas with elementary school. Local entities introducing temporary job and community services for retired people will promote options for elderly people to provide services related to child-rearing. Another 500 billion Yen would be allocated to enhance nursery school enabling them to accept more children on a temporary basis. The ministry also envisions granting one-time payments of 1 million Yen to companies that encourage employees to take child-rearing leave. (August 23, the Japan Times, the Asahi Shimbun)

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare will be more selective in choosing the private vocational schools it will hire to retrain over 400,000 unemployed workers. The ministry intends to end its contracts with schools that are less successful in helping find enrollees new jobs, while entrusting more work to schools with better track records. The purpose is to stimulate competition among schools and thereby raise their quality of service so that workers can quickly acquire new job skills in IT and nursing care and find employment. The ministry aims to begin implementing the new policy in October at the earliest, using data submitted by schools about how many of their students have new jobs in April-September. The ministry intends to use private schools to retrain some 450,000 workers in fiscal 2002, at a cost of 28 billion Yen. In fiscal 2000, only 46% of workers who had received training at private vocational schools found employment, compared with 60% at publicly run schools. The ministry intends to require private schools it hires to report how many of their students have found new jobs. When schools hired by the Employment and Human Resources Development Organization and prefectural governments give courses in IT skills, they receive a maximum of 90,000 Yen in monthly fees per enrollee from the national government. The ministry hopes the new policy will provide schools with an incentive to make more serious efforts to train workers and help them get new jobs. (August 20, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun)