Gifu firms illegally hired Brazilian immigrants' children

Two temporary-job placement agencies in Gifu Prefecture had hired 12 children of Brazilian immigrants of Japanese origin for factory work in violation of Japan's labor regulations, officials of the labor ministry's Gifu bureau said Friday.

The detection highlights the problem that many children among an increasing number of immigrant workers in Japan choose to work, rather than attend school, due to language problems and hardships in their families' livelihoods, experts say.

A local labor standards inspection office has already told the two firms to stop the violation and the children are no longer at work, according to the officials of the Gifu Prefecture Labor Bureau.

The two firms hired a total of 12 boys and girls aged 13 to 15 from around February at an hourly wage of 850 yen at the lowest, and sent them to factories of several companies in Gifu, including parts manufacturers, with which it has such service contracts, they said.

The Labor Standards Act bans employment of any children aged up to 15, regardless of their nationality, from the viewpoint of child protection.

Receiving a tip about the child labor, the Gifu labor standards inspection office checked the firms and detected the practice in November, the officials said.

The children were supposed to attend junior high school but were not going, saying they wanted to supplement family income rather than go to school as classes given in Japanese are difficult to understand and boring.

The firms involved have said they knew the ages of the children but hired them at the request of their parents who were struggling to make a living, they said.

Japan in 1990 began accepting immigrant workers of Japanese descent, mostly Brazilians, who had swelled to around 350,000 as of the end of 2005, many of whom are working at factories in manufacturing-oriented regions such as in central Japan.

There are about 20,000 foreign children of elementary, junior high and senior high school age who need to be provided with Japanese lessons, the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry said.

But many of the children do not go to school because of language problems. International school, meanwhile, is expensive to attend, costing tens of thousands of yen a month, according to the experts.

Nearly 20% of children of immigrant workers are believed to stay away from school, aside from enrolled children who have stopped going to school, said an official of Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, which is an organizer of a meeting of local governments with large immigrant populations.

There are worries that illegal employment of immigrants' children might increase if the school attendance problem remains unaddressed, the official said.

Many immigrants used to go back to their home countries after working in Japan for a certain period, but have begun to settle in the country although it is generally still closed to immigration.