RENGO WEEKLY No. 320, 10 & 17 October 1997

Special resolution concerning the review and revision of labour legislation

Discussing within and also out of the Organization based upon actual workplace situations across the country, Rengo, as the most representing national centre, have developed various activities to demand amendments of labour laws in order to actualize being-well-off and richness and to establish new work rules.

However, there has been little progress made in the last five decades in improving labour standard laws in spite of the revision of Occupational Safety and Health Law and the reduction of working hours. Many things should have been done to satisfy workers' natural requests, such as strengthening regulation of dismissal, providing written labour contracts, drawing up working regulations and setting up the maximum overtime hours.

It is a serious problem that there is a movement to deregulate labour standard making the most of a recent trend of deregulation. Rengo will not allow an idea that economic deregulation and basic workers' rights be treated as the same. Rengo has confirmed its policy that social regulation including labour standards be adequately strengthened, considering the changing environment of employment and labour under economic/social globalization.

Rengo has also confirmed that Rengo will not allow the change for the worse of labour laws which has been discussed by the Central Labour Standards Committee and other labour-related Governmental Committees. In particular, Rengo will make its best effort to actualize the following demands:

To regulate overtime, holiday and night work for both men and women in order to establish a working condition with which men and women can jointly assume family responsibility;
To avoid the deregulation of flexible working time arrangement and the introduction of discretion working time system that will lead to longer working hours;
To implement fully 40 hours a week, abolishing the exceptional treatment;
To improve the provision of employment conditions in writing, blocking the extension of labour contract duration to 5 years;
To amend Partime Workers Law and to ensure its proper implementation;
To block the liberalization of the scope of jobs to be subjected to employment agencies, strengthening the legislation to protect dispatched workers;
To establish a social environment with adequate childcare system and facilities.

Current Domestic
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