INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the world has experienced a significant increase in the numbers of unemployed people. This has happened when the world in general; has experienced a steady increase in the number of students graduating at different levels of education and training. As a result; the number of educated people that are unemployed has increased steadily over the past two decades. Japan is one of today’s largest manufacturing economies. Starting from the early 1990s; Japan experienced economic recession that led to a dramatic decline in company positions available for prospective high school and university graduates. This was the start to an end of a favorable situation for the young Japanese job seekers, which had prevailed for a long time; and presented a great opportunity for most of these young job seekers to acquire permanent employment. During the same period, there was a great increase in the number of young people engaging in various unstable forms of employment, for instance, temporary part time workers referred to as “freeters.”
“Freeters” is an expression in Japanese; for people who lack full time employment with the exception of students and housewives. These freeters earn their income from low skilled thus low paid jobs. In 1982, japan had approximately 0.5 million freeters, by 1987 the number had risen to 0.8 million, and 1.01 million in 1992. The estimates for 1997 were 1.5 million, 4.17 in 2001, and 2 million in 2002. Between the years 2000 and2009, there was a rapid increase in the number of freeters. If the trend continues, there will be more than 10 million freeters in japan by the year 2014. From a survey conducted by the Japanese institute of labor, Freeters work in supermarkets and food stores, some are self-employed, and others work online from their homes in this era of internet. An average freeter earns approximately 139,000 yen (about 1,300 US dollars) per month and works for at least 4.9 days in a week. It was also established that about two thirds of these freeters have never ever had a full time regular job.
RESEARCH QUESTION AND METHOD
The statistics above are striking; they get one to wonder and have several questions regarding the past and future of young people (skilled and unskilled) in japan, as well as the industries and the entire economy of the country. This paper identifies a few of these questions and seeks to understand and explain the situation, and eventually suggest possible ways to help control the situation. To start with, can it be too simplistic to view freeters as the victims of an economic recession? These calls for a careful examination of the social factors (both micro and micro) behind their increase, the working conditions and attitudes, with the aim of revealing any discrepancies in the relations between social systems in the whole Japanese society that are directly related to this phenomenon.
An important question that arises is; what are the exact root causes of the unemployment situation that is currently about to get out of hands? The second question is; what are the effects of these levels of unemployment (or underemployment) to the young people and the rest of the country’s population, and most importantly to the country’s economy? Another crucial question is; how does this worrying trend compare to other with other countries with similar (or almost similar) economic conditions in other parts of the world?
MY ARGUMENT
Since 2003, the Japanese government has struggled with the problem of youth unemployment. With the numbers of young people joining the labor market increasing day by day, this situation can be interpreted as a reflection of the harshness of the labor market. It can also be explained as a failure of the stake holders to nurture the young people and their desire to attain skills and find a profession. There have always existed a significant number of unemployed youths, resulting from school dropouts, lack of employment after school and the lack of technical skills, or the failure to make the transition to regular Japanese style employment. This problem has always existed in japan like many other similar economies, it is just that the problem has been ignored for a long time; but now it has reached a critical point where it has been recognized nationally and globally as something that needs serious attention.
During the 1980s and 1990s, it was a normal process in japan that; the school-to-work transition was atypical entry into the long term regular employment. In recent years; precisely from 2003 to today, there have been changes and more and more young people are unemployed or partially employed. At first, the young people felt a sense of frustration, especially those who were hopeful to be employed immediately after school like their predecessors. As more and time passes and the situation don’t improve, the young people start to accept the fact that they are living in an era characterized by hard economic times. With that in mind, they embrace working in alternative and available part time jobs, and self-employment for those with the ability to do so. In many advanced countries, there is growing difficulty of young people to find permanent employment. The transition towards a globalizing economy requires the concentration of demand for workers with higher education. This serves as a drawback when it comes to the employment of young people especially from high school. To some extent, the increased level of youth has resulted from this transition.
OTHER SCHOLARS ARGUMENT
The Japanese post war society has been characterized by close linkages among three social systems; family, school and company. The families offer motivational and financial support to their schooling children. Schools were involved in the active sorting and distribution of their graduate youths in conformity with the companies’ labor demands. During this period, the companies employed the youth immediately after completion of school and provided intensive in-company training. This was made possible by the companies demand for labor force resulting from the steady economic growth, even after the oil crisis in the 1970s. This inter-system scrum continued through the latent permeation of the post industrialization of the Japanese society until about 1990. Since then, the previous relations between these systems came to a dreadlock. The people who fell into the widening chasm between these three systems, losing their former support and facing the uncertainty common to post industrialization society became freeters.
These freeters are the latent objectors to the mainstream structure of the Japanese society. A large proportion of the freeters refuses the life of the “company-man,” which has become a negative symbol of the mainstream Japanese society. In this sense, the freeters can be seen as the potential pioneers for the next society. Their current life and future prospects tend to be grim with the little possibility to achieve the economic and social independence. The Japanese labor market has experienced changes that also favor the increase of freeters. The shrinkage of the regular workers labor market; the expansion of the irregular labor market and the increase in attractiveness of the special labor market for open-minded professions justifies the increase. It is important to also note that; what drastically declined were “good” jobs for the youth. Even with the recent severe labor market conditions, it is possible to find jobs if the person does not mind the job content and the labor conditions. For instance, the working hours are getting longer and job quantity increasing compared to about 10years back.
MY ARGUMENT INTERPRETATION
In describing the understanding based on empirical data and findings about the freeters phenomenon; the freeters increase can be attributed to several facts and situations. To start; the employers have restrained from recruiting young people as regular workers under the prolonged recession period, which started with the “bubble economy” in the early 1990s. The Japanese case law rules and social norms have been constructed on the basis of long term employment systems with the aim of according workers a comprehensive employment security. The only way that the companies would regulate employment during the recession period was to restrict hiring of new regular workers. This left the high school and university graduates with no place to look up to for regular full-time employment.
The number of job opportunities offered to high school graduates decline drastically from 1,343,000 in 1990, 643,000 in 1995 and then to 272,000 in the year 2000. To fill the opportunities that could have been offered to high school graduates, the companies started to hire more and more typical worker; contract workers, dispatch workers and part time workers in order to meet the labor requirements instead of full time regular employment. The companies changed the trend to hiring typical workers because of the lower personnel cost and a higher employment flexibility. As a result, the graduates could not find regular jobs at the exit from schools and universities. They had no choice but to become typical workers currently known as freeters. The companies’ reluctance to employ new workers is attributed to the economic factors that functioned as an accidental shock that accelerated the companies’ restrictions to employing new workers.
When we put to consideration the demographic structure, the current Japanese population structure by age has two sharp peaks; the babies born at the stability period after the Second World War, and the children to their sons and daughters born in the 1970s and 1980s. The former left school and university at a time when there was high economic growth in the 1960s, and they found regular jobs successfully. The latter grew up to a school leaving age around 1990 when most companies were still hiring school and university graduate for regular jobs when there was still some economic prosperity. As a result, there were two groups of regular workers in the 1990s, with a significant number exiting the workforce in the late 1990s. The two groups above functioned to hinder the companies from hiring school leavers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is explained by the seniority-based wage system of Japanese companies; where the personnel expenses for the older and the baby-boomers, now middle aged, imposed a very heavy pressure on the companies’ financial structure. It has been empirically demonstrated that the more middle aged regular workers a company has, the less it hires young workers. The second baby-boomers that were employed as regular workers around 1990s were more than the first ones. This had a significant effect on the companies’ demand for successive-cohorts under the shrinking economy. This indeed marked these start of the increasing trend of “freeters.”
Another factor that influenced the youth labor market in the 1990s was the expansion of post-secondary education. As the labor demands for new high school graduates drastically decreased in the 1990s, the rate of those who were not fully employed and those that were not attending post-secondary education among high school graduates doubled to 10% in 2003. A survey conducted in 2003 indicated that the companies were more reluctant to hire university graduates than they were in hiring high school graduates. During the period starting around 2003, the number of university graduates that were employed in the companies was almost constant, being slightly above 300,000. On the other hand; the number of new university graduates increased by more than 150,000 in the period starting from 2003 to today. It is clear that the increased unemployment of new university graduates is not only because of the companies’ declining to employ them but also; to a significant level, the excessive supply of these graduates. The lack of employment after high school led the students to pursue higher education hoping that more education could land them a job, that is for those whose household economy and their academic achievements would afford to. This is evident as the rate of those who joined colleges and universities increased from 31% of high school graduates in 1990 to 45% in 2001. This pattern greatly contributed to massive generation of “freeters” who are university graduates.
On economic factors; the longitudinal change in the in industrial structure and a decline in the manufacturing sector in the 1990s caused the sector to reduce its weight in the labor force. This had a great impact as the manufacturing sector provided employment to the less educated youths especially high school graduates as regular workers. To the contrary, the service sector that depends heavily on other types of workers with university education such as finance, insurance and real estate business. During the same period; the service sector reported an increase in the number of young people working. The rate of part-time workers in retail and wholesale food services increased from 18.1% in 1990 to 35.3% in 2000. The number of preference of these areas for irregular workers is the flexibility of working hours and the cheapness of labor.
On how the situation compares with other similar economies, compared to the unemployment pattern in the US, there are similarities such as; the changes in the employment patterns resulting from recession among other reasons. Many Japanese companies have reduced the number of permanent employees for economic reasons and in order to easily adapt to the changes in the business environment. Companies invest on programs that are designed to improve the skills for their permanent employees while there is minimal investment in skill building for temporary and part time employees. This hassled to a wide gap between the permanent employees and the part-timers; especially in the levels of pay. There has been increasing numbers of unemployment in the past two decades in both cases.
CONCLUSION
Today in japan, the “freeters” make up to 11.1% of the youths between the ages of 15 to 34 years. With such high numbers of people it would be important to take a closer look at the social, economic and inherent peculiarities among freeters, as well as any other factor contributing to their steady increase. It is possible that the abrupt social change in the Japanese culture in the recent past has contributed to increased unemployment and underemployment among the Japanese you. The widening gap between the social systems, characterized by neither sufficient financial resources nor political voices has confused the Japanese youth society. The Japanese people should stop act against the problem as it is already well rooted, but try to prevent its further spread. To deal with this issue, the Japanese people need to reorganize the system and inter-system relations in order to empower future generations. The duty of is crucial as it will make the standard Japanese next social path.