일본 변형근로시간제도에 관한 연구

With the passage of the Amendment of Labor Standards Act(‘LSA’) on January 15th 2019, there has been made significant changes in calculating working hours. Before the amendment, although LSA provided that maximum number of working hours is 40 hours in a week, and 8 hours in a day, the courts and the Ministry of Labor have had arguably interpreted the ceiling of working hours did not cover holiday work, and as a result, in practice the actual maximum number of working hours in a week amounted to 68 hours. However, as the Amendment of LSA clearly states that holiday working hours are included in overtime working hours, the actual total working hours in a week is now reduced from 68 hours to 52 hours. As the employers have shown strong opposition to these changes, the tripartite commission made a compromise regarding the reform of working-hours averaging system. The main issue here is to extend the unit period of averaging working hours. They have succeeded in settlement to extend the unit period from 3 month to 6 month despite of the fierce opposition from the labor movement. Their compromise can be appraised as a limited success as I believe they did not carefully consider the various legal issues to be raised when it implemented. In this paper I have tried to examine the potential legal issues arising from the possible extension of unit period of working-hours averaging system in terms of the experiences in Japan which adopted the similar system in 1993. In doing so, I believe we can get some implications for the issues that have not been considered in detail during the social dialogue process.