JAPAN TELLS THEIR FEMALE TEACHERS TO RESIGN FOR GETTING MARRIED, GETTING PREGNANT OR HAVING BABIES | DAY CHILD-CARE CENTRES PERENNIALLY SHORT OF TEACHERS | JAPANESE MOTHERS DESPERATE FOR OPENINGS FOR THEIR CHILDREN AND BEGIN THE SEARCH EVEN BEFORE THEIR BABIES ARE BORN.
Many Japanese women are responding to the government’s anxious call to fill vacant job roles and breathe life into the economy. The Japanese government are eagar to employ enough child-care teachers to work in the child-care centres.
Former teachers and members of the union of teachers cited that the major obstacle to the government achieving that goal is that beyond the long hours of work and low pay, day care female teachers are often demoted or forced out of the job for getting married or pregnant or having babies of their own, subjecting them to discrimination in the very settings created to help them pursue careers.
According to the Ministry for Health, Labour and Welfare, the complaint against employers of labour for demoting their female workers or telling them to resign because of getting married, getting pregnant or giving birth have risen by more than 20% in the last 10 years
Erica Takato, a professional female day care teacher who taught in a preschool, narrated how she lost her job for getting pregnant. Just a few weeks into her term, she was told by her boss that female teachers at the preschool resign once they became mothers.
The report said that she had wanted to work with small children ever since she was a girl and for that reason, she earned a degree in early childhood education and started her career profession as a preschool teacher.
She lamented that she was shocked, discouraged and forced to quit when she felt harassed by her boss and bullied by her fellow teachers.
Kazuya Takemura, a lawyer whose client sued a Japanese Airlines, said that it is difficult for one to go against a company he or she works for. The client, a flight attendant, was forced to take unpaid leave after she reported her pregnancy.
A poll by the National Union for Day Care and Welfare Workers said that most of the licensed day care or nursery school teachers in Japan are women, and many of them end up leaving the profession because it is impossible to continue working once they have children.
Japan’s work culture can be especially inhospitable to mothers and such discrimination in child-care centers blocks other mothers from being able to go back to work and creates a vicious cycle in which day care centers are perennially short of teachers. In many crowded cities, many Japanese mothers desperately hunt for openings for their children and many begin the search before their babies are born.
Day-care female teachers can be asked by their preschool supervisor to schedule their pregnancies so that their maternity leaves would not overlap and any day-care female teacher can be reprimanded for getting pregnant out of turn, the report revealed.
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