9 - Workers and Competition Law in Japan

Summary

In Japan, the Labour Union Act (LUA) guarantees workers the right to associate, bargain collectively and go on strike and the Antimonopoly Act (AMA) does not apply to these actions. To determine whether individuals constitute workers under the LUA, the court assesses multiple factors such as whether they are integrated into a business organisation and if the contract terms are unilaterally decided by the employers. Once they fall outside the definition of workers, their practices fall within the scope of AMA to the extent that they carry out the business as enterprises. Only a practice that has an anticompetitive effect is deemed unlawful under the AMA. With the increase of self-employed workers, the distinction between employee (worker) and enterprise has become blurred. There is also no precedent which indicates how the anticompetitive effect would be examined under the AMA in the case of collective actions of a sole-trader and other microenterprises. Although the AMA exempts the actions of cooperatives, the cooperative may be ill-suited for the selfemployed. These legal environments create serious uncertainty, which may deter taking collective action in order to establish fair trading and working conditions