"Coronavirus feared taking greater toll on jobs than Lehman shock", 20 April 2020

The economic fallout from the new coronavirus in Japan has triggered a sharp increase in nonpermanent workers seeking advice after losing their jobs, with some economists predicting unemployment could rise by over a million within a year, worse than the impact from the 2008-2009 global financial crisis...

On April 7, over 30 organizations, including the Japanese Trade Union Confederation and the Labour Lawyers Association of Japan [LLAJ], held a video conference to discuss the worsening economic situation.

"In early March we had a lot of enquiries about suspending business operations, but since late March it has centered on dismissals," said one participant, while another said the situation in the labor market is "a battlefield."

Regional labor unions also reported firms had begun shortening the contracts of temporary employees, in preparation of laying them off...

"Unlike the Lehman shock, where temporary workers in the manufacturing industry were the hardest hit, this one is causing problems for people with all kinds of employment statuses," said Ichiro Natsume, a lawyer from the LLAJ who instigated the video conference...

...Taro Saito, executive research fellow at the NLI Research Institute, said that at more than 100 trillion yen ($1 trillion), the government's economic stimulus is insufficient, predicting Japan's unemployment rate could rise to 3.9 percent from February's 2.4 percent, with the fallout from the pandemic yet to appear in official data.

...But Shuichiro Sekine, secretary general of Haken Union, an organization which supports nonpermanent employees, said companies may gradually cut payrolls instead of laying off people in one hit. Such an approach could make it difficult to quantify the scale of nationwide unemployment...