Flexibility or inequality: the political debate on dispatched workers

Abstract

Dispatched workers refer to a newly legalised and fast-growing category of non-regular or atypical labour force in post-bubble Japan, who are involved in temporary agency work (TAW). TAW is distinguished from other traditional types of non-regular employment due largely to a triangular structure; while being typically employed by employment agencies, workers are dispatched to work at the facilities of and under the authority of client firms. Although remaining a fairly small percentage of the total workforce, dispatched workers have recently received considerable attention in political debate pertaining to two most noticeable by-products of neoliberalism: labour market flexibility and social divide or ‘widening gaps’ (kakusa). By examining closely the ongoing debate and drawing on anthropological approaches to discourse analysis, this article aims to show the wide implications of Japan's shifting employment landscape against the backdrop of globalisation, as well as power asymmetry and contestation inherent in the discursive process.

Keywords:

• anthropology
• discourse analysis
• globalisation
• neoliberalism
• temporary agency work
• social change

Notes

Non-regular employment in Japan takes a bewildering variety of forms, which are not defined consistently and cannot always be distinguishable in practice. For instance, pāto and arubaito can be used casually in everyday conversation to refer to all kinds of temporary jobs.

The masculine gendering of the word salaryman or sararīman means Japanese women are assumed as either ‘a floating element of the workforce’ (Matsunaga, 2000, p. 174) or supplementary income earners within a male-breadwinner model (Weathers, 2001, p. 223).

Internal labour transfer arrangements, such as tenseki and shukkō, are frequently used by large firms to transfer excess regular workers to their subsidiaries and subcontractors known as ‘group companies’ (keiretsu gaisha). While tenseki requires the permanent conversion of corporate membership to the transferred firm, shukkō allows workers to remain an official member of the original firm. The dual-employer situation of shukkō indicates a customary continuity with that of haken, although the former is operating within the ‘zone’ (ken) of the Japanese lifetime employment system.

The reduction in labour costs against unchanged wages and total employment may also be due to other factors such as automation. However, given the prolonged economic stagnation in post-bubble Japan, it is reasonable to infer that the increased use of non-regular workers contributes most importantly to the reduction in labour cost.

In conjunction with the extensive use of non-regular hirings and internal job transfers, ukeoi was another popular measure to reduce labour cost. Ukeoi can be translated as subcontracting, a common practice adopted by large companies to outsource tasks to their subcontractors (shitauke gaisha). There are two types of ukeoi: ‘off-the-premises’ (kōgai) ukeoi and ‘on-the-premises’ (kōnai) ukeoi. The former means subcontractors carry out the contract independently and outside the client firm's premises, which is the standard form of subcontracting, whereas the latter means subcontractors send their workers to work inside the client firm's premises, which, to some extent, resembles the pre-war oyakata sort of labour supply. Throughout the post-war era and well into the 1990s, the use of on-the-premises ukeoi by Japanese firms was rampant due to the ambiguous and lax legal regulation (see Imai, 2004).

It should be noted that there are two groups of haken: ‘the registered type’ (tōroku gata) and ‘the employed type’ (jyōyō koyō gata). While the registered group includes agencies' contingent registrants who are only considered as haken when actually working on a job assignment, the employed group includes agencies' full-time employees. The government surveys include only the employed type, which numbers 920,000 in 2010, occupying only 34.4% of the total haken population (MHLW, 2011).

Despite their long-existing participation in the labour market, Japanese women until recently were not recognised as pertinent to the discussion of important labour issues. Perhaps nowhere is the idea that labour division by gender is ‘natural’ more evident than in the Japanese male-dominated workplace where a conventional dichotomy exists, characterised by the ‘auxiliary’ employment track (ippanshoku) for women as opposed to the ‘comprehensive’ career track (sōgōshoku) leading to positions in management for men. Since the deregulation of TAW, many Japanese firms have now increasingly replaced female regular entrants allocated to the traditional auxiliary employment track with agency workers (Keizer, 2007, pp. 7–8).

The Japanese state has a relatively small amount of budget for unemployment benefits, accounting for about 0.3% of its gross domestic product, far below many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Moreover, the limited job-loss benefits are designed to help those regular employees; for instance, to receive unemployment benefits, workers must have held the same job for at least one year, which effectively excludes the majority of non-regular workers.

Community unions, which include small TAW unions or networks, are established to challenge the approach of major enterprise unions – Rengo, the largest Japanese national trade union centre, and its branches – by representing low-wage and low-status non-regular workers while emphasising social justice and equality. They have enjoyed some success in recent years, but have not been able to generate a broad-based movement capable of maintaining effective campaigns for major labour reforms (Weathers, 2010).

Such a stance is dismissed by Coffey and Thornley (2009) as not passively adapting to global economic forces beyond their control so much as constructing the very conditions to which it claims to be responding.

See Mainichi Shimbun (2006, February 1).

According to Gottfried (2002), workers fare better in TAW than in other non-regular working arrangements. Around 66% of dispatched workers have universal health and pension insurance coverage whereas only 33% of part-timers receive the benefit. There are also only a small percentage of dispatched workers who have access to private enterprise annuities, bonus payments, lump sum retirement payments, and transportation and vacation allowances.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Huiyan Fu

Current address: Business & Management Department, Regent's University London, Inner Circle, Regent's Park, London, NW1 4NS.