Aurelia Butler

TOKYO (Reuters) – When Riku Omori’s pay at his regular job was slashed by a third, he found temporary work delivering fried chicken and Thai food on his bike on the streets of Kawasaki, south of Tokyo, as a way to supplement his reduced earnings.The extra 100,000 yen ($722) 26-year-old Omori gets a month helps support his wife and newborn son, which would have been difficult on the 160,000 yen he takes home monthly from his main job at a moving services company.But it adds a level of financial uncertainty that makes week-to-week living in hard Japan, an affluent nation otherwise well regarded for its egalitarianism.”The main issue about being freelance is family worries. Your wage will go to nothing if there’s no work,” said Omori, adding that he would have preferred working for a single employer that guarantees a minimum income.Omori is among a hard-to-track group of people who take up freelance work to make ends meet, often doing jobs that fall outside the scope of the labour laws that guarantee a minimum wage and social security.This work ranges from meal delivery and reception work at discount hotels to music teaching, futon sales and toilet maintenance in a country where lifetime employment was once a norm.The emergence of the freelance class poses a challenge to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida who has pledged to redistribute wealth through wage hikes, which have up until now eluded Japan despite a chronic labour shortage.Japan’s most recent jobless rate of 2.6% in July was among the lowest in 38 member nations of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation Development (OECD), slightly above rates reported by Switzerland and Denmark recently.About 38% of the 57.1 million employed workers in the world’s third-largest economy were temporary employees, government data showed, who do not enjoy the same benefits as those on permanent contracts.CURBING COSTSAs the economy slows, firms are cutting costs by filling openings with low-paid or gig workers, instead of higher paid permanent employees, analysts and freelance workers say.”There will be more and more people who can’t get by on their wage even though they’re employed,” said Toshiaki Tsuchiya, 46, a founding member of a freelance labour union.More people will do side gigs that provide little of the security and stability that regular employment brings, added Tsuchiya, who earns about a fifth of his income delivering food in his extra hours.”They’ll have no choice but to work like workers.”Increasing low-paid jobs would depress overall domestic demand, said Shigeru Wakita, a professor emeritus of labour law at Ryukoku University in Kyoto.Wakita expects the number of people who struggled with serious job-related problems to rise due to the prevalence of gig work.”In reality, workers should be protected, but they aren’t treated as such,” he said, adding that Japan’s unions have failed to address the plight of non-regular workers.As part of its attempt to regulate the gig economy, the government has sought to estimate the number of people doing freelance jobs.There were 4.6 million people engaged in freelance work as their main job or on the side, according to a government survey from May 2020, which it also cited in its key annual policy framework released in June.About 63% of those were dissatisfied with their incomes, nearly double those who were “satisfied” or “extremely satisfied” with it, the survey showed.CHANGING NEEDSThe rise of gig work isn’t all gloom.Such work has become more common as demand for job flexibility increases, particularly among Japan’s elderly and housewives seeking to work part-time, analysts said.A government pledge to draw up a plan to increase the number of start-up firms 10-fold within the next five years may also lead to benefits – such a subsidies – for entrepreneurs choosing to work with freelancers, they said.”More people are working differently than before,” said Toru Suehiro, senior economist at Daiwa Securities.The government has said it would consider expanding the eligibility of social security to freelance and gig workers.It also pledged in June to set out laws clarifying contract terms between firms that work with freelance workers.A benefit of freelance work was that the income earned with it was likely to rise in line with skill, Omori said.”As a freelance worker, the more I work, the more I get paid when I do my best,” he said.($1 = 138.4300 yen) More

Britain’s energy crisis will put at risk the health of thousands of children this winter, public health experts have said, as separate research predicted the deepest squeeze on living standards in a century.Public health expert Professor Sir Michael Marmot warned of a looming “humanitarian crisis” and said many children would be affected by the respiratory impact of living in cold, damp housing, adding that more than half of households would be in fuel poverty in January.Marmot’s warning came as the Resolution Foundation think-tank on Thursday forecast that 3mn people would be pushed into absolute poverty by a 10 per cent drop in income this and next year. Energy regulator Ofgem last week announced that the average British household’s yearly energy bill would rise from £1,971 to £3,459 from October. The jump comes amid a wider and intensifying cost of living crisis driven by soaring inflation.In its report, the UCL Institute of Health Equity, which Marmot leads, said a failure by government to act would have “dangerous consequences” for children because of the way damp, cold air affects the development of organs, increasing the risk of conditions such as hypothermia. The IHE estimated that in 2020-21 10 per cent of excess winter deaths — which are higher in the UK than the northern European average — were the result of fuel poverty, and predicted that 55 per cent of households would be in fuel poverty by January, largely because of rising bills.Professor Ian Sinha, consultant respiratory paediatrician at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool and a co-author of the IHE report, said he had “no doubt” that children would die. He added that the hospital was spending £3,000 a time vaccinating babies for respiratory disease, “and yet we are going to send them home to the very circumstances which are going to make them ill in the first place”. The hospital had already set up a dedicated clinic to help parents whose housing was unfit because of the cold and damp, he said.In its report, the Resolution Foundation said soaring energy bills and double digit inflation would cause household disposable income to fall 5 per cent this year and by a similar amount in 2023. This drop in income of 10 per cent over two years — equivalent to £3,000 for the typical household — would equate to the deepest squeeze on living standards in a century.Lalitha Try, a researcher at the Resolution Foundation and co-author of its report, said “no responsible government could accept such an outlook” and called for “radical policy action”. “We are going to need an energy support package worth tens of billions of pounds, coupled with increasing benefits next year by October’s inflation rate,” she added. The think-tank predicted that 3mn more people would enter absolute poverty — which it defined as living on below 60 per cent of the median income after housing costs — over the next two years, taking the total to 14 million in 2023-24. It also forecast that child poverty would reach 33 per cent in 2026-27, the highest level since the 1990s. Among other measures, both reports recommended the introduction of a “social tariff” for energy bills targeted at those on low incomes. The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -The Bank of Mexico on Wednesday said it is not wed to hiking interest rates in line with the U.S. Federal Reserve and will evaluate all available data to bring down inflation.There has been much market speculation on whether Banxico, as the Mexican central bank is known, will follow in lockstep with the Fed as it embarks on what has become the sharpest round of U.S. rate hikes since the 1980s.Banxico raised the benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points at its latest monetary policy meeting in August, mirroring the Fed, as inflation in Latin America’s second largest economy surged to an over two-decade high.”We do not have a specific objective regarding the relative position with the Fed, and the trajectory of the rate will be the one that leads us to the convergence of our inflation target,” Banxico Governor Victoria Rodriguez said as she presented the bank’s latest quarterly report.Rodriguez underscored the Fed’s actions were an important variable the bank took into consideration, but said it was far from the only one being carefully considered and that the bank’s five-member board would evaluate all available data.In an effort to tame spiraling inflation, Banxico has hiked rates by a total of 450 basis points over its last 10 monetary policy meetings, bringing the key rate to a record high of 8.5%.The bank forecast annual headline inflation to reach 8.1% by year-end, from 8.62% in mid-August, with core inflation reaching 7.6% by the end of 2022 and both falling to 3.2% by the end of 2023.”In our assessment, the central bank headline/core forecasts for end-2022 are now significantly more realistic, but for end-2023 are still optimistic given our expectation of significant inertial inflation forces and accelerating wage growth,” said Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) economist Alberto Ramos. Banxico’s quarterly report forecast 2022 gross domestic product (GDP) growth of between 1.7% and 2.7%, maintaining a previous central estimate for economic growth of 2.2%. The bank cut its forecast for 2023 economic growth, projecting an expansion of between 0.8% and 2.4%, from a prior view of 1.4% to 3.4%.Asked about Fed chief Jerome Powell’s stark warning that the United States is headed for a painful period of slow economic growth and possibly rising joblessness as it raises interest rates to fight high inflation, Rodriguez said she did not foresee a U.S. or a Mexican recession.”The context that we are living at a global level, of the pandemic and the war and the high inflation that is leading central banks to tighten their monetary stances, will have an impact on growth,” said Rodriguez. “However, not enough to bring it to recession levels.” More