December 14, 1999

Kiyoshi SASAMORI
General Secretary
Japanese Trade Union Confederation (JTUC-RENGO)

The civil affairs recovery bill is to prevent the bankruptcy for the business on fears of insolvency and to rebuild the enterprise. RENGO believes that this bill was necessary for the people and the laborers because of the aggressive movement of the economy and society because of the huge increase of bankruptcies.

RENGO had been pointing out and demanding Diet solutions to two pending problems related to this bill, one is to assure credit for wages and the other is regulation of business transfers. As for the regulation of business transfers, when you transfer business, in the matters of approval by the court, it is now clearly written in the bill that the court will approve it only when the business continues. As credit for the wages, the special consideration in the event of bankruptcy and reconsideration of the order of the priorities for the credit such as tax credit were added as an additional resolution.

Among the problems is enforcing the law and the low level of credit for wages. The bankruptcy law should be reformed with additional resolutions. Also this law is related to the movement to reform the bill for rebuilding businesses. It is necessary to make a bill to protect workers based on an additional resolution including the reaction for the movement to reform the mercantile law for dividing the enterprise.

It is necessary to enforce the reaction toward labor unions including the organizational activity with reforming the bankruptcy law system for countermeasures against enterprise bankruptcy.

RENGO will work on the reform of the entire bankruptcy law system and the enforcement of the business bankruptcy. We will base our work on finding preventive countermeasures based on the civil affairs reform bill with the committee of labor law and other related committees.