Japan - Workforce
Japan is confronting the demographic realities of an aging and shrinking workforce. In response, the Government is pursuing policies to keep older workers in the labor force; broaden employment options and job retention for women, especially working mothers; and attract more skilled labor from abroad in certain sectors.
More than 2,174,000 foreign nationals live in Japan. The foreign nationals counted have visas of more than 3 months and are registered as residents.
On 08 December 2018 Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling coalition prevailed with legislation to bring more blue-collar foreign workers into the country, in a controversial move to address chronic labor shortages. The bill was enacted after the upper house gave approval despite a raft of criticism by opposition parties following its passage through the lower house in late November 2018. Both chambers are controlled by Abe’s ruling camp.
Under the new system, the government plans to bring in as many as 345,000 foreign workers in construction, food services, nursing and other designated sectors for five years. “We aim at starting it in April next year because we need to swiftly launch the new system in order to deal with the current labor shortage,” Abe told parliament. But opposition parties claimed that the law fails to address the potential impact on Japanese society of new foreign labor, and does not protect foreign workers’ rights.
The law allows foreign nationals with skills in sectors facing particularly severe shortages to obtain five-year visas, which would not allow them to bring their families. Foreign workers in those fields who hold stronger qualifications and pass a more difficult Japanese language test will be able to obtain a visa that can be extended indefinitely, eventually leading to residency, and will be able to bring over family.
Since World War II, employment practices in Japan’s large companies centered on the principles of lifetime employment, seniority-based wages, and enterprise unions. However, the demographic reality of an aging populations and shrinking workforce is forcing many firms to sharply reduce lifetime employment guarantees and seniority-based wages in favor of meritbased pay scales and limited-term contracts. Generally there is adequate availability of skilled labor, although some shortages are beginning to emerge, particularly in the construction industry. Nevertheless, labor mobility between firms remains low.
Traditionally, Japanese workers have been classified as either "regular" or " non-regular" employees. Companies recruit "regular" employees directly from schools or universities and provide an employment contract with no fixed duration. In contrast, "non-regular" employees (such as temporary or contract workers) are hired for a fixed period. Companies have increasingly used part-time workers, temporary contract workers, and so-called “dispatch workers” (contracted through temp agencies) to fill short-term labor requirements and to save on labor costs. In recent years, re-hiring of employees on non-regular status after retirement is also on the rise. Japanese government policy makers are deeply concerned that the number of younger workers in "non-regular" status remains stubbornly high and that the ability of such workers to find permanent employment will decline as they get older. Although labor unions play a role in the annual determination of wage scales throughout the economy, that role has been declining.
Manufacturing and technology have faced increased world competition and personal prosperity declined. Individuals lost their jobs and the promise of lifetime employment vanished in many sectors of the economy. The existing frame relied on an industrial base of manufacturing and technology in which Japanese intelligence, uniformity, and conformity led to high quality products which set world-wide standards for excellence. Now the developed nations are in a post-industrial era in which personal creativity is more valued than uniformity of standards. This demand puts pressure on Japanese people who are used to not being different from others.
In Japan, men in general have very limited choices. The culture demands that they become “real men,” which usually means breadwinners obsessed with their careers. Although hours have been dropping, Japanese still rack up more time on the job than workers in almost any other OECD country, although much of that time is unpaid. Forty percent of workers say they regularly do what’s known as sabisu zangyo — unpaid overtime: 16 hours a month on average. So-called burakku kigyo (black companies) might require over 100 hours, and their youngest employees — those in their 20s — are hit the hardest. Karoshi — death from overwork — is such a prominent problem that the government passed a bill aimed at tackling premature death and illnesses caused by overwork.
Japan is a society with low relational mobility, i.e., people have fewer opportunities to form relationships and terminate old ones. It is also a collectivistic culture, and thus it is difficult to enter existing social groups and circles, hence the prevalence of nomikai (after-work drinking sessions).
Cultural attitudes towards employment in Japan differ from those in Western countries and therefore a Japan specific study is warranted. First, as recognized by many economists, the Japanese labor market is characterized by a high degree of employment security and corporate loyalty by both white-collar and blue-collar employees. Empirical research emphasizes the continued resilience of the so called “lifetime employment” system.
A second difference to Western countries is the strong Japanese work ethic that leads Japanese workers to be less likely to call in sick and to view missed work more negatively than employees from other countries. Indeed Japanese employees’ willingness to work at the expense of their own health is so extreme that there is a word in Japanese, karoshi, which translates to “occupational death” or “working oneself to death”.
Institutional differences in the social security systems are a third factor. Compared to Western countries unemployment benefits are much lower and would incentivize employees to stay in employment as long as possible.
Korea has the highest annual suicide rate in the world. It is noteworthy that the increasing suicide rate is directly correlated with the annual increase in Korea’s gross national product. Japan has the third highest rate of annual suicide (after Hungary) and has witnessed a staggering 30,000 deaths per year for the first decade of the 21st Century related in part to the sustained economic recession. It has not been easy for these proud and tradition-based cultures to acknowledge the relationship between suicide and depression, but the enormous social and economic consequences of the deaths have fostered an unusual partnership between the government and psychiatry to confront this urgent bio-psycho-social issue.
There is a popular expression, kakugo no jisatsu, or suicide of resolve, that essentially romanticizes the act as a way of creating meaning through one’s own death. Until fairly recently, newspaper articles and popular literature frequently associated suicidal acts with taking responsibility for one’s actions or protesting against social injustice.
In the 1930s, Shimoda Mitsuzo, a professor of psychiatry noted that many of his depressed (melancholic) patients were otherwise socially adaptive people who were enthusiastic about work, meticulous, thorough, honest, punctual, and had a strong sense of justice, duty, and responsibility. Clearly, these were the kind of people who were praised by others and seen as reliable and trustworthy. Recently, it has been suggested that Japanese society rewards these “ideal” behaviors that create “model” employees but ultimately yield a melancholic premorbid personality.
The rise of industrialization and isolation from family reinforced the importance of the workplace for these “model” employees. These socially reinforced individuals often define themselves by their work success that requires over-responsibility, perfectionism, and sustained social pressure to outperform. Ultimately, the armor of some of these “model” employees crack and they become depressed because they cannot meet these work expectations.
Whereas suicide was once “normalized” by many Japanese as an act of free will, the alarmingly high suicide rates have contributed to a new conceptualization of suicide as a genuine mental illness and a new category called “overwork” suicide to describe people who take their lives simply because of working too hard. Although overwork suicide represents only a small fraction of the total suicides in Japan, this new category has had a marked social and political impact in the country.
The term karo jisatsu, or overwork suicide, refers to people who are driven to take their own lives after excessive overwork. Although the actual number of Japanese who commit overwork suicide is small, its importance lies in its political and symbolic impact. Increased awareness about overwork suicide heightened in the year 2000 when the Japanese Supreme Court ordered a large Japanese company to compensate the family of a deceased man who allegedly committed suicide because of long and excessive overwork.
Until the collapse of the bubble economy, young Japanese were willing to endure and do as they were told and follow orders because as long as the bubble economy lasted, so did the conveyor system: leave school, get a job for life, retire with a nice pension. Raises and promotions were seen as guaranteed as long as you did not step out of line. It is only since that system stopped working in the 1990s that young Japanese starting questioning the system in which one had to work incredibly hard but with no guarantees of reward.
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