抄録
Wages of non-regular workers such as part-time workers, and workers with fixedterm contracts, have been much lower in Japan than regular full-time workers in long-term employment. A large difference in wage rates between regular and non-regular employees was mainly due to a basic difference that regular workers were hired for a long-term career within a firm through elaborate selection processes administered by the company headquarters, while non-regular workers are more casually recruited by its local management. Wages of regular workers are determined in accordance with their academic background and length of service, and their wages are upgraded with the progress of their long-term career within the company. On the other hand, wages of non-regular workers are determined by the basic standards existing in segmental local labor markets to which they belonged.
Yet, since the end of the 1990s, there have been an increasing number of firms which utilized part-time workers for not only temporary and auxiliary jobs but also for more regular and significant ones. This trend was most typical in retail and other service industries where firms need to utilize women, by introducing merit-based promotion systems to stimulate their talent and dedication.
Against such a background, there appeared a lower court decision in 1996 attempting to rectify large wage disparities between full-time (regular) workers and part-time workers with slightly shorter working times on the same production line, by judging that the latter group of workers were entitled to at least eighty percent of the wages of the full-time workers on the same production line. In so deciding, the court referred to a general social principle of equal pay for equal work, which was quite dubious to recognize as a legal rule existent in the labor law system of that time.
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