From our other sites
The story
According to a survey by Tokyo Shoko Research, 49 of 77 companies in Fukushima Prefecture revised wages following the minimum wage hike that took effect September 3, while over half of the companies said achieving the government’s goal of a nationwide average hourly wage of ¥1,500 within the 2020s would be impossible within four years. On the 5ch News Flash+ (ニュース速報+) thread, opinions clashed between those arguing that companies unable to raise wages should simply be weeded out, and those who, citing the realities of small and midsize businesses bound by lifetime employment and strict dismissal rules, prioritized preserving jobs instead. The discussion branched out widely, with commenters comparing prices overseas and revisiting the long history of rising costs for domestic appliances and food and drink.
(…)
According to private research firm Tokyo Shoko Research, 49 of the 77 companies surveyed in the prefecture — more than 60% — said they revised wages in response to the minimum wage hike that began on September 3.
Additionally, regarding the government’s goal of raising the minimum wage to a nationwide average of ¥1,500 per hour within the 2020s, more than half of the companies said it would be impossible to reach ¥1,500 per hour within four years.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
The government isn't your mommy.
It's a matter of degree, but a wave of bankruptcies would be a real problem too.
Society's productive capacity straight-up shrinks, and those old machines that aging craftsmen have been nursing along are assets as long as they're still in use — but once the business shuts down, they're just scrap metal, so the nation's wealth shrinks along with it.
Plus there'd be fewer jobs to go around.
It's happening sooner or later anyway.
You're just pretending scrap metal has asset value it never really had —
it's basically the same as cooking the books.
20 years ago, if you went to Hawaii you could get a Budweiser for 100 yen. Rich old Japan has really fallen on hard times.
In Hawaii, a can of Coke at a convenience store was ¥800.
Lunch out in town: ¥3,000 and up
Snack bread: ¥400
Canned coffee: ¥300
Pink salon (cheap sex-service parlor): ¥3,500
This is the future we're heading for.
Seriously, prices need to get to about that level or everything just gets eaten up by expenses.
I want to pay decent wages, but it's genuinely a life-or-death issue.
What's actually abnormal is that canned coffee was ¥100 half a century ago and still hasn't even doubled today.
In the US and Europe, prices are already around that level.
Japan is the one that's abnormal.
Seriously, wake up already.
What needs popping is the regional-incompetence bubble.
We've been handing money to incompetent people for way too long.
Tokyo should crush the regions and take all that money back.
Seriously, this. The AI bubble is definitely one of the things fueling inflation too.
Having jobs in the first place matters more than raising wages — these people don't seem to get the social structure involved. Unemployment will rise and public safety will get worse.
That was true back in the Ice Age generation (Japan's lost-decade hiring freeze era).
These days Japan has a labor shortage — if anything, it's companies that are in oversupply.
This is a country that, until just a few years ago, was full of people insisting the yen would never weaken and prices would never rise.
If companies can't turn a profit, they'll keep going bankrupt one after another, and in the end jobs disappear anyway, don't they?
I wonder if unemployment would really rise that much, though?
A wage hike disconnected from supply and demand would just bring back the nightmare of the DPJ government era, wouldn't it?
That only happened during the DPJ era because there was a labor surplus back then.
Today's youth population is half what it was, a completely different environment —
so that comparison isn't even worth making.
Exactly — there's a labor shortage, so the demand is right there.
Unless everyone becomes a temp worker, or Japan adopts American-style rules where an incompetent employee can be fired the next day, small and midsize companies won't survive.
Keep parroting 'companies that can't raise wages should die' like a broken record, and half the small and midsize businesses holding Japan up will vanish.
Weak little mom-and-pop companies like that can just disappear, honestly.
A lot of people don't get that. They say dumb stuff like 'raise wages to American levels' while still keeping lifetime employment intact.
There are people who go on and on about 'free firing' like it's no big deal.
But that only works because job duties and performance reviews are strict, fair, and made transparent both inside and outside the company, you know?
Are there even any core Japanese industries today still paying under ¥1,500 an hour?
Alright then, go ahead and spell out exactly what would happen.
The only way to actually get richer is to raise productivity or increase output.
Those two things, period.
You need a certain amount of brains to understand a complex issue like this.
Inflation from raising workers' wages should produce a far better outcome than the inflation caused by pointlessly flooding the market with cash through monetary easing.
Chanting 'raise wages' doesn't actually raise them.
Employment runs on supply and demand too — wages only went up once there was a real labor shortage.
Back in the day, things like PCs and VHS decks used to cost 2 to 3 times a month's salary.
That's basically graphics cards these days, right?
Not sure what era you're talking about, but even a laptop runs ¥300,000 now, you know?
^
Well, the one who smashed appliance prices in the first place was the now-defunct Daiei.
It smashed prices, then got smashed itself, and ended up demoted to just a division of Aeon.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The ¥1,500 figure traces back to a goal the government set in 2023: raising the nationwide average minimum wage to ¥1,500 sometime within the 2020s. The Tokyo Shoko Research survey, based on interviews with companies in Fukushima Prefecture, draws on a limited sample of 77 firms, but it still points to a large number of small and midsize businesses that can’t secure the funds needed to raise wages. The thread split between those who argued that companies unable to raise wages should simply exit the market, and those who countered that in a Japanese labor market shaped by lifetime employment and strict dismissal rules, ‘just let them die’ isn’t a real answer. Worth noting: the survey covers only some companies within Fukushima Prefecture, and doesn’t capture nationwide trends or differences by industry. The thread also reached no clear consensus on whether raising wages drives up prices, or whether wages rise because of supply-and-demand pressure from labor shortages.
*This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (News Flash+) thread “‘¥1,500 Hourly Wage Is Unachievable,’ Say Over Half of Fukushima Companies.”
Leave a Reply