Major retailer Aeon plans to introduce a system this year to compensate employees who take child care leave with 100% of their take-home pay until their child is up to 1 year old, sources said Thursday.
The system aims to alleviate financial concerns and encourage male employees to take child care leave.
The program, which has no age limit, will be gradually rolled out from March to some 150 companies in the group, although the starting time and the period of compensation may vary. In the first year, the firm expects about 2,000 men and women to take child care leave.
Because the amount of child care leave benefits provided by employment insurance is roughly 80% of the take-home pay at most, those who take leave will be compensated for the remaining 20% after they return to work.
Currently, almost 100% of female Aeon employees who had a child take child care leave, but the rate for male employees is only 15%.
Many employees are hesitant to take leave due to concerns about a decrease in income. The company intends to encourage male employees to participate in child care by implementing various measures to alleviate anxieties about returning to work.
Aeon also plans to establish a system to cope with concerns echoed by employees that taking extended leave could harm their career path. For example, if the company conducts personnel evaluations while an employee is on child care leave, it will base the appraisal only on the relevant period before the employee was absent from work.
Aeon is not alone in moving toward more generous child care leave policies.
Suntory Holdings plans to increase the percentage of male employees taking child care leave to 100% by 2025 from 85% in 2022. At Sapporo Breweries, all workers eligible for child care leave ¡ª both male and female ¡ª took it in 2023 after the firm introduced a program to offer 100% of their salary for the first week and provided an in-house child care adviser.
A survey conducted in June by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare on companies with over 1,000 employees showed that 46.2% of male workers who had a child during the previous business year took child care leave.
As part of efforts to tackle declining births, the government has been taking measures to increase the percentage of men taking child care leave, with a target of raising the ratio to 50% by 2025 and 85% by 2030.
[bio]Information from Jiji and Kyodo added[bio]
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