Japan’s Temporary Worker Problem

Although the government has made several attempts over the last decade or so to change conditions for temporary (or ‘dispatched’) workers, a Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry study has found that about 41% of non-regular workers are doing work on a par with that of regular employees, although only 16% are getting the same pay.

First, an anecdote… I worked for about 5 years in an office of an English language school, alongside several very hard working Japanese staff. What I came to learn after a short time there was that while all of the Japanese staff shared much of their responsibilities and the same working hours, some of them were full time staff with nice pay checks and benefits, while some of them were temporary workers with much smaller pay checks and few, if any, benefits. While some of the staff were earning somewhere around the national average salary, the temporary staff were earning about 800 yen per hour at the time, which equated to about 120,000-150,000 yen per month. I often watched how hard they worked, and almost felt sorry to be earning more than double this for teaching 3 or 4 classes a day…. (almost felt sorry…..)….

It seems that this problem has not been fixed by numerous revisions and tinkering by government with the worker dispatch laws in Japan. Based on the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry’s survey of 6,200 companies in July, 41% of temporary workers held jobs that were similar to those of permanent employees, and in 32% of companies surveyed the remuneration for these temporary workers was 60-80% that of the regular employees. 38% of these companies admitted that the reason for the discrepancy was an attempt to reduce personnel costs.

In another survey, mentioned in the same Japan Times article above, 31% of the 5,000 temporary workers surveyed earned between 1 and 2 million yen per year, while a further 25% earned 2 to 3 million. 39% of those surveyed said that they chose their job because they couldn’t find regular employment.

Now, I am not one for the government to be over-reaching too much into the way that businesses are run. But laws and regulations are there for a purpose. And one of the basic and most important reasons for appropriate laws is to protect people from exploitation. I can tell you that I felt the temporary workers in the English language school were being exploited. And it is the same with many others in similar positions in Japan. In many cases, contract work is designed so that contract workers are paid more, in lieu of less benefits and bonuses etc. But in at least a third of cases in Japan the opposite seems to be the case, and this needs to be addressed.

During the 70s and 80s, Japan’s economy was booming, and many of the big companies were flush with employees. There are the famous stories of people employed to hold cloths against the hand rails of escalators (one person on each side), people being employed to sit at automated entry gates, and of course the ladies in the department store elevators. Many of these people represented (and in some cases still represent) wasted employment. And many of the companies that have been downsizing relentlessly for the last 2 decades have had great reason to do so. However, when people are paid less for the same work, that is something that I have a serious problem with. This is also part of the unheard story of the rising unemployment rate in Japan. While the official rate in Japan is still very low by the standards of most countries, this figure fails to include the large under-employment problem, and the issues regarding equal pay for equal work…

Another side to this issue is the gender issue. In 2001, an article in the Social Science Japan Journal stated that almost 90% of registered temporary workers in Japan were female, and most of these were aged between 25 and 35. The ‘OL’. I’m not sure of the figures today, but I suspect that women still make up a disproportionate amount of the temporary worker pool. The ‘glass ceiling’ has traditionally been harder and thicker in Japan than many Western countries, and this is an area where more equality is called for. Again, I am not suggesting a massive move by government to determine how much everyone should be paid in every situation. But it would seem to me that a more robust legal system would be in order, whereby exploited workers could punished companies for using them (whatever their age or gender) to do the same work as their colleagues for less pay.