- This supplementary budget includes 542.9 billion yen for urgent employment opportunities. However, the budget is too small for a solution to the worst post-War unemployment situation and it doesn't help to ease working people's anxiety.
- On June 9, 1999, RENGO demanded the Prime Minister take urgent employment countermeasures. We wanted the supplementary budget to create job opportunities for more than one million people, to increase basic pension payments from the National Treasury, to increase benefits for children, and enforce environmental measures.
RENGO also demanded from the Cabinet secretary-general on July 5th and on July 6th from other ministers, beginning with the Minister of Finance and the Minister of International Trade and Industry, to form a supplementary budget of 14,000 billion yen. The total would include a 5,000 billion yen earmarked for unemployment countermeasures and create a foundation from which we can recover from this recession.
- However, the supplementary budget the government approved is based on temporary countermeasures to create employment opportunities, such as using 204.7 billion yen to support NPO from local governments, increasing job opportunities in the private section, and using 200.3 billion yen from a special fund to support day care centers convenient to train stations.
The government is not responding to RENGO's demands, and instead tries to quibble.
This supplementary budget not only excludes provisions for employment insurance to the unemployed, but also does not have any of the countermeasures against the recession such as enforcing smaller enterprises and venture businesses, increasing basic pension out of the National Treasury, increasing benefits for children, and enforcing environmental countermeasures.
It is impossible to ease anxieties over unemployment, increase consumption and to recover from the recession.
- The workers are facing a crisis in the future of employment and, consequentially, their lives. Net salaries are going down, unemployment stands at its worst post-World War II rate, and the future of Social Security is unclear. GDP growth between January and March was supported by the public industries. The unemployment crisis is hampering recovery from the recession.
What we really need now are active countermeasures to counter the unemployment crisis. Countermeasures to increase consumer demand and ease anxieties over the future.
RENGO will demand the government, in the second supplementary budget of 1400 billion yen, take concrete countermeasures for employment opportunities and recovery.
At the same time, RENGO will press to amend the "Industrial Recovery Bill" to create more job opportunities and provide union-management cooperation and also push for approval of a bill to protect the workers against corporate organizational changes.
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