Tokyo: The Japanese Trade Union Confederation, or Rengo, held an annual May Day rally on Saturday, with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida being the first sitting leader of the country to attend the event in nine years.

Kishida’s attendance at the 94th May Day central convention, held at Yoyogi Park in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, was apparently intended to demonstrate his stance of putting top priority on achieving wage growth in cooperation with the labor side.

Rengo did not set a cap on the number of participants for the first time in four years, holding the event at a scale on par with before the COVID-19 pandemic. The rally attracted some 28,500 people, according to the organizers.

A May Day declaration adopted at a ceremony during the event said that the novel coronavirus crisis and sharp inflation are severely impacting vulnerable people, calling for the highest priority to be given to the promotion of measures to protect people’s livelihoods.

“In order for society as a whole to feel that ‘life has gotten easier,’ wages must be raised at small businesses, which together employ 70 pct of all workers” in the country, Rengo President Tomoko Yoshino said, urging labor unions to tenaciously negotiate wage hikes with the management side.

“The biggest goal in my ‘new capitalism’ initiative is increasing wages,” Kishida said. “We will promote optimization through the appropriate transfer of labor costs.”

May Day rallies had attracted some 40,000 people before the spread of the novel coronavirus. The 2020 and 2021 rallies were held online amid the pandemic, while last year’s rally was held in person for the first time in three years although the number of participants was capped at 5,000.

JIJI Press