Due to the expansion of the global economy and the decline of the labor union membership rate, the labor share of wages has fallen, and middle and lower class employees have seen only sluggish wage growth. However, minimum wage policies are effective in raising wages independently of labor market pressures. We need to reevaluate the impact of minimum wage policies and their effect on reducing poverty and economic inequality.Our four papers focus on topics related to minimum wage polices and can be roughly divided into two groups. The first group analyzes the impact of raising minimum wages on economic performance and poverty. The second group deals with how to raise the minimum wage. Whether the government should intervene in negotiations related to wage decisions between employers and labor unions is a very important issue. Finally, we argue that raising minimum wages and social security systems should not be incompatible.

An incomes policy is a state intervention into labour-management wage negotiations, and it is aimed at curbing wage raises in order to fight inflation. In a word, incomes policy is a “nominal income （wage） suppression policy”. On the other hand, the wage policy conducted by the Japanese Government in recent years is a state intervention into labour-management negotiations seeking to raise wages in order to fight deflation, and as such is a nominal income （wage） promotion policy. In this sense, it is appropriate to call the government’s policy an interventional wage increase policy, or simply, an “inverse incomes policy”. Why has the Government adopted such a historically unusual wage policy ?In this report, we will examine wage trends in recent years and strive to grasp the mechanism of wage determination in modern Japan. Then we will divide the “inverse incomes policy” into （１） the minimum wage increase policy and （２） the standard wage increase policy, and discuss the progress, significance, and limitations of these two approaches.

Despite the high labour participation rates of single mothers in Japan have high poverty rates. This study first analyzed the characteristics of work poverty among single-mother households to estimate the using anonymous microdata from the Employment Status Surveys from 1992 to 2007 to estimate the poverty rates by employment status and household characteristics. The results indicate that working-poverty rate estimated using only the mothers’ employment income exceeded 70％. The increase in the working-poverty rate among single mothers had much to do with irregular employment, short working hours, low educational attainment, and having yonger children.In analyses of the correlation between rates of increase in regional minimum wages and changes in mothers’ employment rates by prefecture, neither single nor marrid mothers had a negative correlations between the minimum wage and employment rate. This finding indicates that the raising minimum wage did not lead to decrease in employment, possibly suggesting that the recent rise in the minimum wage could reduce the working-poverty risk among single mothers.

The December 2016 amendment of the Employees’ Pension Act, which was intended to expand its purview to part-time workers, introduced a new, tighter, wage requirement. We have examined whether this requirement is consistent with former conditions, how many low-wage part-time workers are actually excluded, and whether this expansion can be expected to have a ripple effect on the levels of future employees’ pension benefits （the replacement rate）.We present three main findings. First, the new, tighter wage requirement changes the reference point from a minimum wage to a balance between contributions and level of benefits for the national pension. This is a change from former requirements. Second, the new requirement excludes a large number of low-wage part-time workers ; their number is almost equal to the number that would gain coverage if the expansion of eligibility were to be applied to all work places. Third, further substantial expansion would cause a decrease in the mean wage levels of insured workers. As a result, the level of current pension benefits （the replacement rate）, which is linked to the mean wage growth, may also decrease. This side effect can be exploited to improve the fiscal balance between current and future beneficiaries.

Due to neoliberal globalization and attacks by employers in the 1980s, the US labor movement suffered a sharp decrease in union density and faced the possibility of extinction as a result. After many trials and tribulations, the labor movement discovered a way forward in cooperating and fighting alongside the community in what has been called “Social Movement Unionism.” By focusing on local issues, campaigns to pass living wage ordinances and organizing immigrant and low-wage workers, social movement unionism has strengthened the ties between the labor movement and the community.In 2011, Occupy Wall Street brought attention to growing inequality and poverty in the country, catapulting into the national conversation the question of how to bridge the divide. A year later, in 2012, fast food workers and Walmart employees set off a nationwide strike calling for a $15 an hour wage and the right to unionize. Such efforts, in which the labor movement worked in tandem with the community, became the foundation for the Fight for $15 movement. Working closely with other movements led by low-wage workers, Fight for $15 has expanded its reach to make increases in the minimum wage a reality in many parts of the country.

The Abe administration recently announced its “Action Plan for the Realization of Work Style Reform”. The Action Plan states that promoting teleworking, side jobs, and moonlighting will help to bring about a society in which people can flexibly adjust their work schedules to match their life stages, including periods of childbirth, childcare, and nursing care. Recently, crowdsourcing companies have been listed on “TSE Mothers” and home telework is now considered to be a flexible new way of working within the rubric “Era of 100-year Lives”.In this report, based on the results of an interview survey with single mothers and disabled people who work at home, I consider whether home telework offers the flexibility required to cope with life stages such as childbirth, childcare and nursing care. The interview survey was conducted with disabled persons registered in home telework support organizations. I also intend to conduct an interview survey with single mothers who have taken the telework training program. By doing this, I will present the true conditions of disabled persons and single mothers conducting telework in their homes.

Though their working times are variable and pay low, dependent contractors are excluded from labor law coverage. However, the Abe administration, which recently announced its “Work Style Reform” campaign to revitalize Japanese employment practices, aims at expanding the employment of persons not in official employment relationships. For this reason, new policies to protect dependent contractors are urgently needed.But there are almost no protective policies for dependent contractors in Japan, so these workers are forced to file lawsuits to gain appropriate employee rights. In other words, even a dependent contractor who works long hours for low pay cannot have his/her fundamental worker rights acknowledged without winning in court.I describe the conditions concerning an employee by examining legal struggles. This enables me to grasp the conditions of the dependent contractor relationship to complement the quantitative information. Finally, I emphasize that this study is important for understanding what protective policies are necessary to supply dependent contractors.

This study analyzes two questionnaire surveys （panel data comparing two time points） regarding work rules. The respondents of the first survey are third- and fourth-year university students, while respondents of the second survey are individuals who have been part of the workforce for not more than two years. The analyses revealed three important findings.First, the average awareness score for work rules decreases for individuals after their graduation. As for individual work rules, awareness increased for certain items, while awareness of other items declined. However, it is possible that workers respond “unaware” because they regard the knowledge as “not relevant.”Second, for persons already working, if the number of problems at the workplace is high, knowledge regarding work rules increases. It can be deduced that workers acquire “relevant” work rule knowledge to suitably address problems at the workplace.Third, in enterprises that have a labor union, awareness of workplace problems suggests that employees have acquired this knowledge while employed. We posit that the presence of a union helps employees to recognize that knowledge of work rules is relevant and useful when they encounter workplace problems.

This paper reconsiders the effect of welfare states on social capital in terms of the categories of trust, generalized trust, and particularized trust. Previous studies have proposed two different hypotheses about the relation between welfare state generosity and the creation of social capital. The institution-centered approach claims that welfare states facilitate the growth of social capital, while the society-centered approach supports the hypothesis that welfare states decrease social capital. By analyzing the social capital concept, we detected a compatibility between these two conflicting hypothesis, namely that the effect of the generous welfare state on particularized trust is negative but that on generalized trust is positive. The empirical results partially support the hypothesis of compatibility. First, there is a unique combination of highly particularized and highly generalized trust only in universal welfare states such as Scandinavian countries. Second, the generosity score of welfare states has no significant effects on both particularized and generalized trust ; however, with regard to families, the financial support of welfare states has a positive relationship with generalized trust. Finally, there is no significant negative correlation between particularized trust and welfare state generosity. We do not observe results that correspond with the society-centered hypothesis.

The Act on Eliminating Discrimination against Persons with Disabilities and the Amended Act on Employment Promotion of Persons with Disabilities in 2016 introduced into Japan the principle that there should be reasonable accommodation toward eliminating social barriers faced by persons with disabilities. However, there is doubt whether reasonable accommodation is a right guaranteed by the equality provision under Article Fourteen of the Constitution. In the U. S., there are similar arguments regarding affirmative and negative theories about reasonable accommodation as a right. The purpose of this article is to advocate reasonable accommodation as a constitutional right. The methodology is to categorize the theories that advocate denying the right of reasonable accommodation under the equal protection clause into three categories : （１） those contrary to similar treatment ; （２） those against the merit system ; and （３） those contradicting the rationality of capitalism. The article then presents evidence to disprove these three theories. Consequently, in reality, traditional anti-discrimination doctrine requires not only similar treatment but also differential treatment for minorities. According to provisions of the ADA, reasonable accommodation does not ignore merit systems and capitalist rationality, showing that reasonable accommodation does not violate the Constitution. This analysis can serve as an argument that reasonable accommodation is a right derived from the Constitution of Japan similar to that of the equality clause in the U. S.