| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,700,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The Japanese labour market has exhibited more flexibility in recent years. It has done so in two areas. One has been a reduction in the number of regular employees. The other area has been in the utilization of various forms of irregular or atypical employees, such as temporary, dispatched, and casual workers etc. The total number of employees is decreasing. Thus, deregulation of labour market has not brought about the improvement of structural unemployment, but the increase of precarious employees with short and fixed term contract.
We investigated private employment agencies and subcontractors. Some of them illegally dispatched the workers to production lines of user factory. The gap of working condition between regular employees of user and dispatched workers has widened. Most irregular employees usually earn much less than regular ones. Therefore, replacement of regular employees with temporary dispatched workers means the increase in the ratio of low-wage earners among all employee
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s. Flexibility of employment will no doubt allow companies to increase efficiency by cutting labour costs, but will also impose difficulties on Japanese economy by curtailing demand in the domestic market.
We also studied the effect of the public unemployment relief work project funded by the government. It is scheduled to run up to 550 billion yen for six years from 1999 to 2004. This relief work project is utterly different from the deregulation of labour market. It surely offers jobs to the unemployed people, even if each employment term is limited for less than 6 months.
In Sweden, on the one hand, the government has promoted privatization of some public sectors and allowed private employment agencies to run business. However, dispatched workers are protected by the collective agreement between the employers and trade union, unlike Japan. The government has also promoted the active labour market policy. The relief work projects are connected with various vocational training. On the other hand, the public sectors offer job opportunities to the people, and a lot of employees are still working at the public welfare and care sectors. Less
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