Times are so hard for the major Japanese computer manufacturers right now that they plan to lobby the government for financial aid to keep their surplus employees on the payroll. The Electronic Industry Development Association wants the government to meet some of the cost of retraining and of keeping workers at home, under a Labour Ministry plan set up to help prevent lay-offs. To qualify, an industry must in the previous three months have seen both value of production and number of its new employees fall by more than 5% from the previous year. With an upper limit of $77.7 a day, a large firm can get half, small and medium-sized firms two-thirds of the cost of paying an employee to stay at home. Software and semiconductor capital equipment industries have already invoked the system.
