Though the percentage occupied by small scale enterprises is high in the industrial composition of Japan, health supervision of workers engaged in small scale enterprises is far more retarded than that in large scale enterprises. It is necessary to ascertain how retarded the health supervision actually is in order to introduce improvements in environmental sanitation and health supervision of workers engaged in these small scale enterprises. The author conducted a survey on four types of industries by scale, that is bolts and nuts manufacturing industry, garment sewing industry, plastic processing industry, and bread and confectionary industry. It was found that the smaller tha scale the higher the percentage occupied by family members, minor workers, and old aged workers and that there was an increase in small scale enterprises not to provide a weekly rest day to workers. Workers in most of these enterprises work 10∼12 hours per day with a smaller percentage of workers covered by the social security scheme than those of larger enterprises. Environmental sanitation of many of these small scale enterprises is poor and only 13% of such enterprises provide medical examination for tuberculosis with little effort in the way of other health matters. little utilization is made of community medical institutions except for emergency care. Though there were evident signs of collaboration among small scale enterprises, collaboration with regard to health matters was hardly noted in these enterprises. Only 9% of the small scale enterprises were sub-contractors of large scale enterprises while larger percentage of them were sub-contractors of small and medium scale enterprises. None of the small scale enterprises was found to provide a health supervision program.
