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The story
The Niigata Regional Minimum Wage Council has recommended raising the hourly minimum wage by 58 yen to 1,108 yen starting in October, but labor unions including “Echigo Union” have objected, arguing that this “isn’t enough to live a decent, human life.” On 5ch’s News Express+ (Newsplus) thread, opinions clashed between those who called the raise reasonable given rising prices and those worried it would squeeze small and mid-sized businesses, sparking debate over what the minimum wage should actually be.
Regarding Niigata Prefecture’s minimum wage, a labor union has objected to the council’s recommendation to raise it to 1,108 yen, saying “this still makes life a struggle.”
The objection was raised by the labor unions “Echigo Union” and “Rainbow Union.”
On the 5th, the Niigata Regional Minimum Wage Council recommended to the Niigata Labour Bureau that the prefecture’s minimum wage be raised by 58 yen to 1,108 yen, effective October 1.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Won't work unless wages rise 5% every year.
A society where they rise 5% every year — sounds great!
Trying to bump up welfare payments too? ("namapo" = slang for public welfare assistance)
Given how much prices have risen, ¥1,500 isn't such an unreasonable figure.
An hourly wage of ¥800 15 years ago is worth ¥1,600 today.
If they can't raise pay, they'll just have to cut hours so the effective hourly rate clears the minimum.
If a company can't pay enough for a full-time worker to actually live on, maybe it deserves to go under.
Sorry, but please be society's sacrifice.
No, seriously —
if we don't raise the floor,
Japan is finished.
Yeah, that's basically it.
My own pay keeps going up, but I want everyone else to stay stuck on low wages.
Jobs will disappear.
If jobs vanish over something that small, they weren't worth keeping lol. Good riddance 🥴
Maybe those are jobs that deserve to disappear.
An hourly wage of ¥800 back in the day equals about ¥1,600 now — it's obvious if you look at the numbers, but nobody brings it up.
Even in discussions about the minimum wage, nobody mentions it.
wages that were already above it aren't rising at all — someone needs to fix that too.
Well, that money has to come from somewhere to fund the minimum wage hike, so those other wages will rise even less.
In the end everyone just ends up on minimum wage.
Even among full-time employees, new grads and people in their 40s are ending up on almost the same pay.
The Ice Age generation really got screwed. ("Ice Age generation" = those who entered the job market during Japan's 1990s–2000s downturn and got stuck with poor career prospects)
I worked a restaurant part-time job for that rate back when I was a student.
Wasn't that a bit earlier? lol
Anyway, food service jobs did pay low wages back then.
The government can just subsidize the shortfall.
That's what taxation as wealth redistribution is supposed to be.
If the minimum wage here were ¥4,000 like in the US or Europe, you could live cheap buying stuff from Japan once it's turned into some trash-tier poor country.
A ¥1,000 bowl of ramen in Japan already feels like about ¥200 to people from overseas.
Just eat the food from Cheap Japan.
Even if you work hard for a raise, it only goes up by like 5-10 yen an hour.
People who really work hard are earning the equivalent of ¥5,000 an hour.
Why don't you just work hard enough to get your own wages up?
An hourly rate of ¥5,000 — what big corporation is that? ＼(^o^)／
Exactly.
There's nothing wrong with paying ¥5,000 an hour to someone who generates ¥10,000 an hour in profit.
Employers made the same threats when it went from ¥900 to ¥1,100, and it turned out fine once it actually happened.
¥3,000 might be a stretch, but ¥1,500 is no problem at all.
Any business that collapses over that was a zombie company hooked on slave labor anyway.
Apparently if you're not generating 3x your salary in gross profit, you're basically stealing your paycheck.
So at a ¥1,500 minimum wage, you'd need to bring in ¥4,500 an hour just to avoid running a loss.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s minimum wage is not a single national figure but a patchwork set annually by 47 prefectural councils — each made up of labor, employer, and neutral “public interest” representatives — which recommend a rate to their regional Labour Bureau based on guidance handed down from the central Minimum Wage Council each summer. Niigata’s council recommending 1,108 yen (up 58 yen) for October is this routine process playing out; unions publicly objecting to the recommendation as insufficient is also a near-annual ritual, not a sign the figure will change. What matters for context is the geographic gap this system produces: Tokyo’s minimum wage sits well above 1,100 yen while rural prefectures like Niigata lag behind, a disparity that has long been cited as a driver of young workers leaving regional areas for the capital.
The thread’s actual fault line wasn’t over the raise itself but over what happens next in the pay structure: whether businesses too thin-margined to absorb a wage floor increase deserve to fail, versus whether pushing the floor up simply compresses everyone else’s pay toward it, since employers fund the increase from the same budget that would otherwise go to raises above minimum wage.
One claim worth flagging for readers: the “800 yen 15 years ago equals 1,600 yen today” comparison, repeated approvingly in the thread, overstates Japan’s actual inflation — cumulative CPI growth over that period has been nowhere near 100%, even accounting for the sharper price rises since 2022. No poster checked this, and it went unchallenged.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+/Newsplus) thread “Minimum Wage of ¥1,108 — “This Isn’t Enough to Live a Decent Life”: Labor Union Objects to Niigata Regional Minimum Wage Council’s Recommendation.”
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