Industrial Safety and Health Act

The purpose of this Act is to ensure workers' safety and health in the workplace and to facilitate the creation of comfortable work environments, by advancing comprehensive and systematic measures related to industrial injury prevention, such as the taking of measures to establish standards for hazard prevention, clarifying accountability structures, and promoting autonomous action with a view to preventing industrial injuries, in conjunction with the Labor Standards Act (Act No. 49 of 1947).

In this Act, the meanings of the terms set forth in the following items are as prescribed in those items:

"industrial injury" means a worker being injured, contracting a disease, or dying due to a construction, equipment, raw material, gas, vapor, dust, or the like that is connected with the worker's employment, or as a result of a worker's work activities or other duties;

"worker" means a worker as prescribed in Article 9 of the Labor Standards Act (excluding a person who is employed at an undertaking or office at which only cohabitating relatives are employed, and excluding domestic servants);

"employer" means a person that is engaged in an undertaking and that employs a worker or workers;

"chemical substance" means an element or a compound;

"work environment monitoring" means designing a plan for monitoring, taking samplings of, and analyzing (including doing analytical research on) the air quality and other aspects of the work environment in order to assess the actual conditions of the work environment (including the degree to which workers are exposed to harmful factors in the work environment).

Not only must an employer comply with the minimum standards for preventing industrial injuries provided for in this Act, but it must also work to ensure the safety and health of workers in the workplace through the creation of a comfortable work environment and the improvement of working conditions. Furthermore, an employer must work to cooperate with government-implemented policies for preventing industrial injuries.

A person that designs, manufactures, or imports the machinery, tools, or other equipment; that manufactures or imports raw materials; or that constructs or designs constructions; must endeavor, in designing, manufacturing, importing or constructing them, to contribute to preventing the occurrence of industrial injuries caused by their use.

A person, such as an orderer of construction work, that contracts out a job to another person must take care that it does not attach conditions, regarding things such as construction techniques, work methods, the construction period and the delivery date, that could impede the safe and healthy performance of the work.

In addition to observing the necessary particulars to prevent industrial injuries, a worker, and a person other than a worker who is engaged in work on a job at the same site as workers, must also endeavor to cooperate with measures to prevent industrial injuries that the employer and related parties implement.

If two or more employers with business undertakings in the construction industry have been contracted to work together jointly on a job that is involved in those undertakings that will be carried out at one site, they must designate one person from among themselves as a representative and file a notification of this with the Director of the Prefectural Labour Bureau, pursuant to Order of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare .

If a notification under the provisions of the preceding paragraph has not been filed, the Director of the Prefectural Labour Bureau designates a representative.

A change to the representative referred to in the preceding two paragraphs does not become valid unless a notification is filed with the Director of the Prefectural Labour Bureau.

In a case as provided in paragraph (1), this Act is applied by deeming the relevant business undertakings to be the undertakings of the representative referred to in paragraph (1) or (2) alone, the representative alone to be the employer in those undertakings, and the workers engaged in the jobs involved in those undertakings to be workers employed solely by the representative.