Today, Japan faces an employment situation that is unprecedented in its seriousness. The main factor behind this dire situation is the government's deflationary policy, which gives top priority to fiscal reconstruction and to suppliers' interests. But it is not the whole story.
Another major factor behind the situation is corporate personnel policies that place the emphasis on the recruitment of human resources that can be of immediate service to companies, under a general management strategy skewed excessively toward short-term gains.
Japanese companies are lapsing into an endless race of cost reductions. They are halting the hiring of new graduates, dismissing middle-aged employees, and in essence limiting recruitment to those who can be of immediate service without training, and to atypical workers with fixed-term employment. Moreover, this bottomless cost-cutting competition, led by export-oriented companies, is being waged on a global scale in parallel with the reconfiguration of the international division of labor, exacerbating the employment situation.
Starting approximately three years ago, the Japanese government began to stress “excess employment,” along with “excess debt” and “excess capacity,” and the government's “White Paper on Labor” presented the view that the Japanese practice of long-term employment is now becoming an impediment to changes in industrial structure. The Council for Regulatory Reform, created by the Cabinet of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, has followed this line of thinking and is proposing a number of specific regulatory reform steps in the jobs market.
Thus, the employment problems we now face are not limited to increasing employment and longer periods of joblessness, but extend to the undermining of hard-won work rules.
Above all, what we cannot overlook is the increasing number of so-called atypical workers.
Atypical workers are generally subjected to the following disadvantages:
(1)Huge gaps in employment conditions in comparison with regular employees
(2) Precarious employment status
(3) Limited social security coverage
(4) Exclusion from equal labor-management consultations
(5) Lack of job training opportunities
(6) Social discrimination
In short, in Japan, where the external labor market is not yet fully developed, atypical workers do not have the benefit of basic labor market rules, such as “equal treatment” (equal pay for equal work) and “equal bargaining,” even when they work in the same way as regular workers do.
Thus, the “diversification” of employment we are now seeing in Japan is simply an expansion of options for employers, and not a broadening of choices for the working population.
If the number of atypical workers keeps increasing unchecked, and the number of regular employees keeps shrinking, the foundation of social stability in Japan could be undermined, along with the very basis of human resources development that should be essential for employer companies.
The current situation in Japan , as described above, should provide some future lessons for Asian countries.