In Japan, the land of the mythical lifetime employment, peaks and valleys in demand are managed with temporary workers. As long as work is there, they work. If demand dries up: “So sorry, your temporary time is up. Ja ne!” During carmageddon times, most if not all of the temporary workers in Japan had been sent home – often to no home at all. The hiring of temporary workers is a closely watched leading indicator in Japan, signaling an uptake in business. The Nikkei [sub] reports that Toyota companies are hiring contract workers again as production is picking up.
Toyota Industries Corp. will take on 350 or so new workers starting this July, the first hired in about a year. Denso will hire 200 new temps to deal with an increased demand for autoparts, especially for hybrid cars. Toyota itself started hiring temporary workers for the first time in about 16 months, adding 1,600 new workers.
The Nikkei urges caution: “A government program of subsidies for new-car buyers is set to end in September. Toyota group firms may be hiring again, but they will likely wait to see how conditions look in the fall before deciding whether to keep expanding their payrolls.” Push comes to shove, the temps will get the shove.
I read long ago about some Brazilian workers there. They get temporary jobs too?
The Brazilian workers are being offered one way tickets back to Brazil by the Japanese government. Have been for the last year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/global/23immigrant.html
In any case the lifetime employment system in Japan is dying an ugly death and has been for the last 20 years or so. There’s a whole generation of workers – some now reaching their early 40’s – who have never been made full-time by their companies. They’re referred to as “Freeters”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeter
It’s a bad time in Japan these days, especially so because there’s still a social expectation of lifetime employment.
The reason why Freeter’s exist is because part-time pay in Japan is pretty high. A simple data-entry job can pay up to 2500円/hour ($27/hr) with bonuses, where data entry would be a minimum wage job in the rest of the world. The reason why is because labor pool of unskilled workers is very low because of tight immigration policy.
As far as ’employment for life”, it was a massive inefficiency. The old system where management would be scared of laying off workers due to some odd sense of responsibility, even in times of financial difficulty, was not an efficient usage of labor and money. Worse, was the seniority-based promotion system, the merit-based system which it is changing to is more economically sound and is in line with how the rest of the world does business.
The cruel reality is that labor needs to be efficiently allocated to parts where they aren’t needed to places where they are. “Employment for life” does not make sense in the modern global economy.
As far as Japanese immigration policy, they need to open it up so that unskilled labor can fill the those ‘freeter’ positions. Nurses from the Philippines or Thailand, or cleaning ladies from China should displace the Japanese from those positions, wages for those jobs need to fall, and those Japanese need to be reallocated to better suited positions. But doing so would raise unemployment, and you have issues that more immigration-friendly countries have, basically people complaining that immigrants “took our job”.
Japan has a strange citizen concept, which it shares with places like Germany and Israel: If you are of Japanese ancestry, you are entitled to Japanese citizenship. The people in the NYT article are being paid off to not invoke that rule.
I think the UK and Ireland also share that concept, limiting it to the grandsons of the original emmigrant.
My parents are Italian born and I can also petition to get Italian citizenship.
An interesting article I read a few months ago on the plight of the Brazilian-Japanese workers concluded that, although they receive Japanese citizenship, these workers are treated as foreigners. Feeling rejected by their ancestral birth place, they revert back to being “Brazilians” – and as anyone should know, no one can party like a Brazilian – loud music, good food, great drinks, lots of laughter, beautiful women alllll night long. Anyway, once they reverted back to being their joyous loud selves, they were further cast off.
That’s too bad … the Japanese needs some Brazilian blood in them.
One thing they are neglecting to mention is the circumstances of these jobs. I live in Japan and work in a small technical school, and my students would rather stay at home and live with their parents than work for the auto companies now. They days of well-paid, motivated Japanese factory workers are long long gone. (L’avventura, 2500yen may be true for a full-time permanent staffer, but those jobs are virtually extinct now, especially for new hires. For real-world jobs, it’s more like 1000yen/hour, no benefits, and part-time or temporary employees don’t get bonuses)
Toyota is looking looking for people who will move to the city where their factories are for a 6-month contract, low pay, no benefits and no chance of becoming an actual Toyota employee (these jobs are contracted through temporary agencies. Add to that the usual abusive Japanese work environment, forced unpaid overtime, and accommodations in crowded company dorms deducted from paychecks.
Lifetime employment was certainly unsustainable and inefficient, but they have swung to the other extreme. If Toyota is having quality problems, it just might be because their cars are being built by workers who took the job out of desperation and are hoping to get out as soon as possible. Career counselors at my school say that 7-11 and McDonald’s are offering better jobs and a brighter future than the “typical” Japanese industries.