Gov't to propose legal ban on age limits in recruitment

this is the one thing i complain about most when people ask why i don't want to stay in japan forever. i'm currently 35, and it breaks my heart (well, not really...) when i go to a restaurant and realize i'm "too old" to work at el torito. the most extreme example was this shop in osaka that was seeking a female employee, 20-22 years old!

now, i just hope they can enforce it....

 

For the first 10 years this law takes effect, I believe age limits will continue to be a deciding factor during hiring. Think of the computer terminals at Hello Work (Japanese gov't sponsored employment agency). The first question asked when searching for jobs on these computers is "How old are you?" On the written form resumes/CV's one of the first fill-in-the-blanks is your birth date. Think of the massive changes that would have to take place throughout the country eliminating these text fields from documents/computer programs. Then the interview. While there are people who look/dress younger/older than their actual age, most do not (especially here in Japan) and the hiring employer is sure to take this into consideration.

I believe this law will not be effective until we see a 40 year old cleaning tables at a Japanese McDonald's or a 35 year old モーニング娘.

 

in the fast food industry here--all three of the counter workers at the McDonald's downstairs are women over 40 (at least).

The service industry moves faster because they deal with lower skill sets and higher turnover, it is the corporate environment--companies large and small--that makes few if any provisions for hiring outside of traditional age groups.

This is just the formalization of a loose regulation from a few years ago that "asked" companies not to mention gender or age in help-wanted ads. It had no effect that I could see, in that while they may have left the information out of the ads themselves, few companies actually changed their requirements.

 

its a step in the right direction, but unless there is punishment for disobedience, it won't work.

If you are saying the company gets fined Y10,000,000 per incident and Y1,000,000 per harraser, and its actually enforced, you probably
won't see much improvement unfortunately.

 

itself first. Example: If a person is older than 37, they are no longer eligible to take the teacher's exam.

Why? I think the best teachers are those who have worldly experience.

It shows when teachers graduate from high school, college and then go straight to teaching. It seems they dont have a solid background to help the students who are looking at jobs in the future that does not entail teaching.

 

actually...i wonder if that's a societal thing that also needs to be gotten rid of (if that's even possible). when i applied to jet, it said that applicants "should" be younger than 40. when i asked someone about that, they mentioned that there was this whole "sempai" thing, and that it might be weird for a jet to be older than the teachers they work for or even the principal, since age = respect level, or something to that effect. so maybe it's a matter of the boss feeling "weird" that their employee is older than they are (though, as was stated, mcd's does have some older employees). maybe there needs to be some incentive program to reward employers who hire older employees instead of trying to punish ones who don't comply. i mean, unless someone can prove they didn't get a job because they were older, it would be easy for a company to say the person not hired just didn't "fit" in the company.