Correction & the latest on white collar exemption

In my earlier post ““White Collar Exemption” and the danger to the LDP” I noted that Chief Cabinet Yasuhisa Shiozaki remarked that the government would try and submit bills that would make it possible to exempt workers making more than 9 million yen from overtime payment. I originally said that the move would affect 20,000 people, but that was a typo. It would actually affect 200,000 people. And as this new article from Asahi Shimbun notes, some politicians with sense don’t want to anger 200,000 voters 6 months before a major election:

Despite concerns about a backlash from voters, the government plans to submit legislation to the Diet that would introduce U.S.-style working rules exempting tens of thousands of white-collar workers from overtime pay.

Ruling coalition officials said pushing the so-called white-collar exemptions for labor standards would hurt them in this summer’s Upper House election.

However, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki reiterated on Thursday that the government would submit the legislation to the Diet session scheduled to start later this month.

“We are making efforts now to move in that direction,” Shiozaki said at a news conference.

To alleviate concerns among ruling coalition officials, labor minister Hakuo Yanagisawa met with Liberal Democratic Party policy chief Shoichi Nakagawa and others Wednesday and explained the broad outlines of the proposed legislation.

Yanagisawa said the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare was contemplating applying the white-collar exemption to workers making more than 9 million yen a year and who have discretion over their work responsibilities.

Yanagisawa said that under those conditions the new exemption would affect only about 200,000 workers, or about 0.4 percent of the total working population of 54 million.

Those employees will not be paid overtime allowances even if they work more than the legal standard of eight hours a day or 40 hours a week.

…

However, calls increased from the ruling coalition to put off the submission of the bill until after the Upper House election. Labor ministry officials were then forced to present a specific annual salary figure.

According to calculations based on labor ministry statistics, about 5.4 million company workers in Japan make more than 9 million yen a year.

That figure includes about 3 million workers in management positions who are already exempt from working-hour standards.

If employees who do not have discretion over how they proceed with their work are excluded, the figure is about 400,000.

Labor ministry officials assumed that half that number were white-collar workers.

The article reminds us that this plan, like the town meeting scandal, is another political headache that Abe has inherited from Koizumi, who included a promise to consider implementing overtime exemptions in a “three-year plan for deregulation and opening up government projects to the private sector.” However, it’s doubtful that Koizumi would have been so awful at explaining this issue to the public (or try to push through a bill that’s so clearly biased toward corporate interests).