Labor Market Reform, Work Precarity, and Union Response in Japan

• In Event: Current Issues in Labor & Work: Precarity, Automation, and Inclusion

Abstract

Work precarity has increased in Japan since the collapse of the bubble economy in the early 1990s. Against the background of economic stagnation and intensified economic competition from neighboring Asian countries, the government of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) implemented labor market deregulation in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. This has contributed to the increase in non-regular workers, who are low-paid and subject to easy dismissal, and the issue of work precarity was well recognized in Japan by the mid-2000s. Although the center-left government of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) between 2009 and 2012 increased the level of protection for non-regular workers to some extent, it did not eliminate the problem of work precarity. The current, center-right LDP government since 2012 implemented deregulation of temporary agency work in 2015 but more recently, introduced worker protective measures such as the introduction of ‘equal pay for equal work’ (while deregulating working-time regulation related to regular employment) through the Work-style Reform in 2018. However, the issue of work precarity still exists widely.
This article will examine why the issue of work precarity remains unresolved in Japan despite the governments’ recent introduction of worker-protective measures by analyzing not only the relevant public policy such as labor market policy and social policy but also unions’ preferences and response to this issue. The article will also examine the perspective of labor market dualism and dualization critically. Insufficient social policy such as meager unemployment insurance, low minimum wages and a lack of social safety net in other respects has certainly contributed to a high level of work precarity among workers in Japan. It is true that the characteristics of labor market reform changed to some extent from deregulation up to the mid-2000s to the higher level of worker protection, mostly for non-regular workers, since then. In this sense, a simplistic perspective of labor market dualism and dualization such as unions’ intention to protect jobs of regular workers in cooperation with employers and the government at the cost of non-regular workers does not hold. This is also true in countries with ‘flexicurity’, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, and southern European countries such as Italy and Spain, where the governments introduced ‘de-dualization’ policy of more flexible regular employment and greater protection of non-regular workers (if to a limited extent) after the global financial crisis. In the Japanese case, however, the government measures to increase worker protection has not been enough. This is because of the weak political power of the governing party due to a lack of control of Upper House (in the case of the center-left DPJ government) and the nature of worker protection measures being merely a tool to achieve economic growth by increasing the income of non-regular workers and labor productivity rather than being an attempt to increase worker protection per se (in the case of the current, center-right LDP government).
However, in addition to the role of public policy such as labor market reform, this article also argues that the role of labor unions (their preferences and behaviors) has been crucial to the increase in work precarity in Japan. Rather than intending to maintain ‘solidarity’ among workers to address the issue of work precarity, Japanese unions based on enterprises (enterprise unions) have preferred to maintain the vested interests of regular workers in large companies and implemented a dualization strategy of job protection for regular workers at the cost of non-regular workers. In this case, the dualism perspective holds. However, this strategy has reduced the power resources of enterprise unions by alienating an increasing number of non-regular workers (while the percentage of regular workers among total workers has continued declining) and allowed the LDP government to introduce certain deregulatory measures aimed at increasing the flexibility of ‘regular’ employment (such as the deregulation of work-time rules and the diversification of the category of regular workers), which increased the level of work precarity among an increasing number of regular workers, especially those in small- and medium-size enterprises. This is a recent phenomenon that is difficult to be explained by the dualism perspective. Although Japanese unions that are not based on enterprises (such as community unions that organize workers irrespective of their company affiliation) have addressed the issue of work precarity to a greater extent than enterprise unions, their power resources are too small to confront employers for a large number of workers to improve their work conditions. As a result, the issue of work precarity remains unresolved in Japan.

Author

• Hiroaki Richard Watanabe, Ritsumeikan University