Brokerage in the Cross-border Labour Market: Recruitment and Training of Vietnamese IT Workers by Japanese Temporary Staffing Firms

ABSTRACT

Despite a declining population, the Japanese government has been reluctant to relax its immigration policy, which has forced private companies to seek their own ways of sourcing foreign labour. This article explores how Japanese temporary staffing firms (TSFs) have shaped the cross-border labour market for skilled labour candidates by developing their own educational programmes and networks in Japan and Vietnam. While existing research on the international migration industry and brokerage focuses on private brokers in the different stages of migration, this study examines the role of private actors in the migration process, from recruitment to training. The study is based on fieldwork, including interviews with staff of Japanese TSFs, their client companies and Vietnamese IT workers. The findings are twofold. First, through their own recruitment and training schemes, these TSFs provide Japanese language and culture training to Vietnamese skilled labour candidates on behalf of their clients. Second, such training is used to create ‘ideal’ migrant workers for Japanese employers. The study thus illustrates that intermediary actors are indispensable to the migration process, which creates mutual dependency between TSFs, Vietnamese workers and Japanese companies in the cross-border labour market.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporary staffing firms
• cross-border labour market
• migration industry
• brokerage
• Japan
• Vietnam

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their very detailed comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding and Ethical Clearance

This study is based on my PhD thesis. I obtained funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) during my candidature. I confirm that this study meets ethical guidelines and adheres to the legal requirements of the studied countries.

Notes

¹ This study uses the terms ‘intermediary actor’, ‘broker’, ‘brokerage’ and ‘agent’ interchangeably.

² The H-2 temporary worker programme is a guest worker programme in the US, whereby foreign workers are allowed to work temporarily in certain sectors for an employer nominated on their visa (Anderson, 2019).

³ Hierarchy and seniority are embedded in communication as early as secondary school in Japanese society (Yoneyama, 1999), and young people are trained to become ‘adults’ through communications between junior and senior club members during club activities at secondary school (Wang, 2020).

⁴ The literal translation is ‘battle-ready forces’, and the term was originally used in the context of war. However, this term is now applied in human resources to refer to someone who can be an immediate asset to a firm.