It is essential that our employees possess specialized skills, knowledge, and experience if we are to maintain product quality and improve productivity. In order to make good use of the production spirit, technologies, experience, and skills that the Sumitomo Metals Group has amassed during our more than 100 years of existence to achieve continual growth, it is important that our expertise be reliably transmitted from one generation to the next. As we enter an age when our veteran employees, who make up approximately 40% of production site workers, entering their retirement age, maintaining and improving the levels of production site expertise is an issue of the greatest importance for our company.
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 entering their retirement age, |
In recent years we have actively hired new graduates, and as a result our employees’ average age has been significantly lowered. We also engage in mid-career hiring as a means of improving the age structure, and at the same time some of our rehired retirees are engaged in training younger employees so that skills are retained and accumulated within the company. Of our employees who reached retirement age during fiscal 2010, approximately 80% have been reemployed.
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Re-employment rate |
As we have assigned high priority to employing disabled persons, their ratio to all our employees exceeds the requirement set by law. We are also continuing to expand the business operations where disabled persons are employed, including the establishment in 2007 of a subsidiary companies at the Kashima Steel Works and Wakayama Steel Works that provides new jobs for disabled persons.
Note: Due to a revision of the law in July 2010, the exclusion rate applied to the number of regular employees, which is used to calculate the ratio of disabled persons employed, was lowered from the previous value of 30% to a new value of 20%.
