Yes, the Japanese economy is recovering and the number of full-time jobs is growing, but that only adds to the frustrations of the millions of Japanese who graduated from college during the decade long jobs slump that ended in 2003. While Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was in office, from 2001 to 2006, Japan lost 4 million full-time jobs and gained 4.3 million part-time and temp jobs. Now an estimated population of 5 million singles increasingly find themselves stuck without the skills or experience to command corporate careers, and some are starting to organize. “It’s as if a balloon is stretching thin that is about to explode,” says Kazumi Ito, chairman of the Tokyo Young Contingent Workers’ Union, one of the groups that organized the Sunday rally. And the public, which for years dismissed the underemployed “lost generation” as lazy kids who would grow up one day, is now starting to worry that they will become a permanent underemployed and unmarried burden on society.
That has forced the new administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to take notice. He recently announced “Second Chance” programs to provide job training and other assistance to struggling workers. The government has also passed a labor law to encourage and in some cases require companies to pay part-time workers more. Although $725 million has been allocated so far, these moves are criticized as too vague or limited to make much difference. And the new rules leave companies wiggle room to resist the cost of paying higher temp wages.
According to the government, there are as many as 1.9 million “freeters,” or workers under 35 without a stable job, moving from one odd job to another. The figure has gone down slightly over the past year, but has almost doubled over the past 15 years. Their wages are often nearly equal to the level of welfare for the unemployed, the disabled and underemployed single mothers: about $13,300 a year, or at most, $16,700. “It’s the lower end of jobs that are growing,” says Hidetoshi Nishida, the executive director at Tokyo Union, a trade union that actively supports all types of workers. The mounting use of mobile e-mails to solicit spot workers seems to add to the increasing fragmentation of the job market. Some have become so strained between odd jobs that they have become “Internet café refugees,” living from one Internet café to another, if only temporarily.
To be sure, the problem of the swelling ranks of part-time employees is not unique to Japan, but the wage inequality they face is. Part-time male workers make 60 percent and female workers make 40 percent of comparable full-time workers, according to Rengo, the nation’s largest labor union. In Europe, these figures are as high as 80 to 90 percent, while in the United States they are about 60 percent, according to 1999 OECD data. In the past, that gap was tolerated partly because many part-time workers were dependents, such as housewives. Today, they are increasingly the breadwinners.
In recent months, contract workers, including those working for Canon and Hitachi, have formed their own unions to fight against their employers. “We just could not stand huge discrepancies in compensations anymore” between full-time and contract workers, says Takeshi Koyano, director general of Gatenkei Rentai, a trade-union network established last October aimed at helping contract workers improve job conditions and solve labor disputes.
The semi-idle pose a big challenge. Even now, their failure to consume is a drag on the economy. Facing a long-term labor shortage, Japan needs skilled workers as well as nonskilled and inexperienced ones. And many of these workers cannot afford to pay obligatory pension premiums, much less to marry and start a family. “They could become a sort of bad loan,” a cost that only grows the longer it goes unmet, warns sociologist Masahiro Yamada.
For decades Japan focused on building the wealth of the nation, says Koyano, but now is the time to pursue the well-being of the individuals. “All we want is a decent treatment of workers. If that’s not met, we’ll be a nation without hope.” Japan ignores the protests of the working poor at its own peril.
