10 ms·

Japan labor shortage prompts shift to hiring permanent workers

63 points by oska 10y ago

throwawaygaijin 10y ago
It is funny because I just looked at an email from HR and saw that there was 9 people "at elevated risk of Karoshi" in my department of <100 IT people. Media BS aside, the labor shortage has certainly not brought any improved worker treatment. (Incidentally, there is a union here, but they are not very effective at anything, as is the norm for Japanese unions)
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Does your union leadership rotate in and out of HQ management brass like mine did?
- redstripe 10y ago
  I know it's cynical but it feels like the term "labour shortage" is just a way of complaining about not being able to find desperate laborers at bottom dollar. Here in Canada, I've seen plenty of job ads that were more or less "we have job, come work here". It's like they don't even try and then proceed to step 2: complain about the labor supply. I can only image that the situation is a lot worse in a country that overworks it's people as much as Japan.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    > ...I've seen plenty of job ads that were more or less "we have job, come work here". It's like they don't even try and then proceed to step 2: complain about the labor supply. This kabuki theater by business political advocacy groups is a perverse form of the old Soviet joke "they pretend to pay us; we pretend to work", except the pretend on the part of labor hasn't taken hold yet at large scales. Perhaps a perverse form of a Potemkin village is a more fitting picture.
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    I think it's a bit judgemental to say that Japan overworks people, the place functions to some of the highest standards, and excels in many ways like nowhere else in the world. After a lifetime of "overwork", retired japanese people opt to do part time work to stave off boredom. I think they just think of it differently.
    - patio11 10y ago
      Japan is a big country and there are people with diverse views in it. Overwork is widely recognized to be a societal problem here, in the same fashion that e.g. racism is widely recognized to be a problem in the US. You could certainly find people who disagree with either conclusion, but you could also find people who disagree that the earth is round. There exist government employees whose literal only job is preventing deaths from exhaustion. Japan has at least a few hundred of these a year; the true number of excess overwork-caused death is probably low tens of thousands when you factor in suicides.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - mistermann 10y ago
    > It's like they don't even try It's often because the ad is "fake" in the sense that is is a mandatory first step before applying for a temporary foreign worker because they "couldn't find" a Canadian to fill the job. I know someone who worked at a foreign recruitment company so I know all about the outright fraud that goes on. I also know someone that works at a company that sells relatively large $ commodities into China, so I get to see all the fraud of how Chinese do business (big deals being chopped up into smaller pieces and deposited into "nieces and nephews" accounts, etc). I refuse to believe the Canadian government isn't well aware this is all going on (for example, it accidentally leaked that they don't audit suspicious real estate deals if a non-Canadian is involved as it might be perceived as racist), which is pretty damn depressing considering more and more people including high paid professionals are struggling financially.
ekianjo 10y ago
That's not going to increase consumption demand on the market. New workers in Japan and especially wary about the future and are not like the spenders of the Bubble 時代.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  If there's one word to describe the Japanese population, I would choose "realists". Sharp contrast to the eternal optimist, borrower spender American stereotype.
  - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
    Seems like some irony/self-fulfilling prophecy going on here, though. The optimist, "borrower spender" American is another side of the same coin that values risk taking and has tolerance for failure. If you are too "realist", your reality might actually end up being worse than if you were an optimist.
    - doctorcroc 10y ago
      You're both right, and that's the beauty of culture. The double sided sword yields both benefits and disadvantages. The irony is that America's historical appreciation of immigration (one of the best ways to mitigate cultural blind spots) has yielded a backlash against the lack of a cultural bedrock, and become a double edge sword itself.
      - krapp 10y ago
        > The irony is that America's historical appreciation of immigration (one of the best ways to mitigate cultural blind spots) has yielded a backlash against the lack of a cultural bedrock, and become a double edge sword itself. Only for people who refuse to appreciate that immigration as a whole is America's cultural bedrock, and not merely the effect of immigration from a particular group or region.
        10y ago
ericdykstra 10y ago
I live in Tokyo, and I've seen this trend in action. Jobs that would almost certainly be part-time in America, such as chain yoga or exercise class instructors, are often full-time employees.
- ramchip 10y ago
  I think haken is a very common though, for all kinds of office workers. It's full-time employment, but it's not permanent employment.
marak830 10y ago
I just want to chime in here: seishein(full time permanent) workers over here get a lot of protection mandated by law. For example if my company closes, they have to pay me 3 months of my salary while I find a new job, and I'm quite difficult to fire. Infact one of the old chef's just stopped turning up and said I needed a break, they had to pay him 3 months salary still. Edit for more info: That is why there has been a huge reduction in the past 10 years (this is anecdotal evidence I have heard by word of mouth), of hiring staff as seishein. One school I worked at refused to put staff on as seishein, then myself and a few others left due to this, and they changed their practices.
- matthewbadeau 10y ago
  Minor correction: it's "seishain". 正社員(せいしゃいん)
  - marak830 10y ago
    Thanks, my Japanese is really bad haha.
- mac01021 10y ago
  If your company closes? Like if they go out of business? What if they don't have the money?
  - kartan 10y ago
    > What if they don't have the money? I don't know how it is in Japan. But in Spain, there is a fund, paid by all companies, that is used in this situation. It works like a mandatory insurance. If your company goes under, your employees get the money from the fund. The fund name is FOGASA (FOndo de GArantia SAlarial), it means salary guarantee fund.
  - marak830 10y ago
    I don't know the answer to that sorry. It's all pretty confusing haha
patio11 10y ago
Once again with "There are no shortages, there is merely a disagreement with reality about how much labor costs." It does not astound me that companies are having difficulty hiring white collar workers for $2k a month with the expectation of traditional Japanese working conditions but with traditional American expectations about job security.
- bostik 10y ago
  With an unemployment rate at 2.8%, I would say that there actually is a shortage. That figure is already lower than the expected unemployment rate at "full employment" scenario. [0, 1] At the same time I am not going to dispute your opening line: because there sure as hell is a disagreement on labour cost too. Which brings up another fascinating point: the situation is Japan is going to be a data feast for economists. A modern, technologically advanced country going through such a shortage of labour that it's affecting the equilibrium and general conditions of the labour market. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Employment_in_a_Free_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Employment_in_a_Free_Soci... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
  - runeks 10y ago
    Why does full employment indicate a shortage, in your opinion? If 2.8% of the iron we dig out of the ground remains unused, is there a shortage of iron? In my world this would indicate abundance.
    - andy_ppp 10y ago
      Economists consider around 5% unemployment healthy, allows for people to retrain and move jobs and it's better to have some slack in the system while people move around.
  - Camillo 10y ago
    Why do we even bother discussing the unemployment rate any more? It is now common knowledge that it does not include people who have given up on finding a job, people who are underemployed, people who went on disability as a replacement for unemployment subsidies, etc. I think at this point we can just move on. I will state it explicitly: the notion of "expected unemployment rate at full employment" is meaningless. Whatever the supposed number is, it tells us nothing and deserves no discussion.
csa 10y ago
Japan Inc has been giving the shaft to young people with regards to permanent worker status for about 25 years now. The conditions are such that the social contract that some/many older Japanese believe exist is distinctly a part of history for a lot of young Japanese. This has, imho, created a lot of challenges related to social stability and the economic aspects related to social stability (e.g., housing trends, marriage, having children, education, etc.). As such, I hope that this is the beginning of a long upward trend in increasing the proportion of permanent workers. It will likely be very good for Japan in the long run if it can be sustained. I will be interested to see what happens during the big worldwide economic downturn.
- devoply 10y ago
  I hope going forward humans are realizing that we don't need things, we need social systems which function. That's much more important that the latest doodad or car. It's more important to have good functioning social systems which support the masses and allow them to have some sense of a life... rather than being treated like one night stand employment agreements that we have today... and being in a constant state of being used and under-appreciated.
capsulehotel 10y ago
When companies complain about labor shortages, it usually implies not enough people willing to work for poverty pay. There are more and more young people completely dropping out of society because there is nothing in it for them, so they rather live on their parents dime. Jobs available to those that did not excel in school and joined the right companies are pretty much low paid temp jobs for life. Japanese women are extremely picky due to their financial independence, so some lowly temp slave will never get any. When you remove all rewards to social participation people dropping out left and right is what happens. When it comes to tech jobs even very low paid front end remote jobs (30-40k) tend to get 100+ applications on angel.co and I doubt the vast majority are anywhere near totally unqualified. The bar is constantly being raised while the pay is lower than ever before.
welanes 10y ago
This is good news. For those who have not seen it, Japan: A Story of Love and Hate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH-kNnq7mFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH-kNnq7mFM) is an excellent - and often poignant - window into the life of a Japanese temp* worker. * temp: working 15 hours a day in three jobs.
thedailymail 10y ago
Another major change not mentioned in the article is the revisions to Japan's labor law that now makes it a requirement to hire any "fixed-term" (=yearly contract) worker who has been at the same company for five consecutive years on a permanent basis from year 6, or else terminate employment by the end of year 5. This will go into effect for people who have been working at the same place for years at the end of this fiscal year (March 2018). There are still some differences, such as lack of a retirement bonus and there may be some lingering status issues ("tenured" staff traditionally rank higher).

63 points by oska 10y ago

It is funny because I just looked at an email from HR and saw that there was 9 people "at elevated risk of Karoshi" in my department of <100 IT people. Media BS aside, the labor shortage has certainly not brought any improved worker treatment. (Incidentally, there is a union here, but they are not very effective at anything, as is the norm for Japanese unions)

hkmurakami 10y ago
Does your union leadership rotate in and out of HQ management brass like mine did?
redstripe 10y ago
I know it's cynical but it feels like the term "labour shortage" is just a way of complaining about not being able to find desperate laborers at bottom dollar. Here in Canada, I've seen plenty of job ads that were more or less "we have job, come work here". It's like they don't even try and then proceed to step 2: complain about the labor supply. I can only image that the situation is a lot worse in a country that overworks it's people as much as Japan.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  > ...I've seen plenty of job ads that were more or less "we have job, come work here". It's like they don't even try and then proceed to step 2: complain about the labor supply. This kabuki theater by business political advocacy groups is a perverse form of the old Soviet joke "they pretend to pay us; we pretend to work", except the pretend on the part of labor hasn't taken hold yet at large scales. Perhaps a perverse form of a Potemkin village is a more fitting picture.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  I think it's a bit judgemental to say that Japan overworks people, the place functions to some of the highest standards, and excels in many ways like nowhere else in the world. After a lifetime of "overwork", retired japanese people opt to do part time work to stave off boredom. I think they just think of it differently.
  - patio11 10y ago
    Japan is a big country and there are people with diverse views in it. Overwork is widely recognized to be a societal problem here, in the same fashion that e.g. racism is widely recognized to be a problem in the US. You could certainly find people who disagree with either conclusion, but you could also find people who disagree that the earth is round. There exist government employees whose literal only job is preventing deaths from exhaustion. Japan has at least a few hundred of these a year; the true number of excess overwork-caused death is probably low tens of thousands when you factor in suicides.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- mistermann 10y ago
  > It's like they don't even try It's often because the ad is "fake" in the sense that is is a mandatory first step before applying for a temporary foreign worker because they "couldn't find" a Canadian to fill the job. I know someone who worked at a foreign recruitment company so I know all about the outright fraud that goes on. I also know someone that works at a company that sells relatively large $ commodities into China, so I get to see all the fraud of how Chinese do business (big deals being chopped up into smaller pieces and deposited into "nieces and nephews" accounts, etc). I refuse to believe the Canadian government isn't well aware this is all going on (for example, it accidentally leaked that they don't audit suspicious real estate deals if a non-Canadian is involved as it might be perceived as racist), which is pretty damn depressing considering more and more people including high paid professionals are struggling financially.

ekianjo 10y ago

That's not going to increase consumption demand on the market. New workers in Japan and especially wary about the future and are not like the spenders of the Bubble 時代.

hkmurakami 10y ago
If there's one word to describe the Japanese population, I would choose "realists". Sharp contrast to the eternal optimist, borrower spender American stereotype.
- hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
  Seems like some irony/self-fulfilling prophecy going on here, though. The optimist, "borrower spender" American is another side of the same coin that values risk taking and has tolerance for failure. If you are too "realist", your reality might actually end up being worse than if you were an optimist.
  - doctorcroc 10y ago
    You're both right, and that's the beauty of culture. The double sided sword yields both benefits and disadvantages. The irony is that America's historical appreciation of immigration (one of the best ways to mitigate cultural blind spots) has yielded a backlash against the lack of a cultural bedrock, and become a double edge sword itself.
    - krapp 10y ago
      > The irony is that America's historical appreciation of immigration (one of the best ways to mitigate cultural blind spots) has yielded a backlash against the lack of a cultural bedrock, and become a double edge sword itself. Only for people who refuse to appreciate that immigration as a whole is America's cultural bedrock, and not merely the effect of immigration from a particular group or region.
      - 10y ago

ericdykstra 10y ago

I live in Tokyo, and I've seen this trend in action. Jobs that would almost certainly be part-time in America, such as chain yoga or exercise class instructors, are often full-time employees.

ramchip 10y ago
I think haken is a very common though, for all kinds of office workers. It's full-time employment, but it's not permanent employment.

marak830 10y ago

I just want to chime in here: seishein(full time permanent) workers over here get a lot of protection mandated by law. For example if my company closes, they have to pay me 3 months of my salary while I find a new job, and I'm quite difficult to fire. Infact one of the old chef's just stopped turning up and said I needed a break, they had to pay him 3 months salary still. Edit for more info: That is why there has been a huge reduction in the past 10 years (this is anecdotal evidence I have heard by word of mouth), of hiring staff as seishein. One school I worked at refused to put staff on as seishein, then myself and a few others left due to this, and they changed their practices.

matthewbadeau 10y ago
Minor correction: it's "seishain". 正社員(せいしゃいん)
- marak830 10y ago
  Thanks, my Japanese is really bad haha.
mac01021 10y ago
If your company closes? Like if they go out of business? What if they don't have the money?
- kartan 10y ago
  > What if they don't have the money? I don't know how it is in Japan. But in Spain, there is a fund, paid by all companies, that is used in this situation. It works like a mandatory insurance. If your company goes under, your employees get the money from the fund. The fund name is FOGASA (FOndo de GArantia SAlarial), it means salary guarantee fund.
- marak830 10y ago
  I don't know the answer to that sorry. It's all pretty confusing haha

patio11 10y ago

Once again with "There are no shortages, there is merely a disagreement with reality about how much labor costs." It does not astound me that companies are having difficulty hiring white collar workers for $2k a month with the expectation of traditional Japanese working conditions but with traditional American expectations about job security.

bostik 10y ago
With an unemployment rate at 2.8%, I would say that there actually is a shortage. That figure is already lower than the expected unemployment rate at "full employment" scenario. [0, 1] At the same time I am not going to dispute your opening line: because there sure as hell is a disagreement on labour cost too. Which brings up another fascinating point: the situation is Japan is going to be a data feast for economists. A modern, technologically advanced country going through such a shortage of labour that it's affecting the equilibrium and general conditions of the labour market. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Employment_in_a_Free_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Employment_in_a_Free_Soci... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
- runeks 10y ago
  Why does full employment indicate a shortage, in your opinion? If 2.8% of the iron we dig out of the ground remains unused, is there a shortage of iron? In my world this would indicate abundance.
  - andy_ppp 10y ago
    Economists consider around 5% unemployment healthy, allows for people to retrain and move jobs and it's better to have some slack in the system while people move around.
- Camillo 10y ago
  Why do we even bother discussing the unemployment rate any more? It is now common knowledge that it does not include people who have given up on finding a job, people who are underemployed, people who went on disability as a replacement for unemployment subsidies, etc. I think at this point we can just move on. I will state it explicitly: the notion of "expected unemployment rate at full employment" is meaningless. Whatever the supposed number is, it tells us nothing and deserves no discussion.

csa 10y ago

Japan Inc has been giving the shaft to young people with regards to permanent worker status for about 25 years now. The conditions are such that the social contract that some/many older Japanese believe exist is distinctly a part of history for a lot of young Japanese. This has, imho, created a lot of challenges related to social stability and the economic aspects related to social stability (e.g., housing trends, marriage, having children, education, etc.). As such, I hope that this is the beginning of a long upward trend in increasing the proportion of permanent workers. It will likely be very good for Japan in the long run if it can be sustained. I will be interested to see what happens during the big worldwide economic downturn.

devoply 10y ago
I hope going forward humans are realizing that we don't need things, we need social systems which function. That's much more important that the latest doodad or car. It's more important to have good functioning social systems which support the masses and allow them to have some sense of a life... rather than being treated like one night stand employment agreements that we have today... and being in a constant state of being used and under-appreciated.

capsulehotel 10y ago

When companies complain about labor shortages, it usually implies not enough people willing to work for poverty pay. There are more and more young people completely dropping out of society because there is nothing in it for them, so they rather live on their parents dime. Jobs available to those that did not excel in school and joined the right companies are pretty much low paid temp jobs for life. Japanese women are extremely picky due to their financial independence, so some lowly temp slave will never get any. When you remove all rewards to social participation people dropping out left and right is what happens. When it comes to tech jobs even very low paid front end remote jobs (30-40k) tend to get 100+ applications on angel.co and I doubt the vast majority are anywhere near totally unqualified. The bar is constantly being raised while the pay is lower than ever before.

welanes 10y ago

This is good news. For those who have not seen it, Japan: A Story of Love and Hate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH-kNnq7mFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH-kNnq7mFM) is an excellent - and often poignant - window into the life of a Japanese temp* worker. * temp: working 15 hours a day in three jobs.

thedailymail 10y ago

Another major change not mentioned in the article is the revisions to Japan's labor law that now makes it a requirement to hire any "fixed-term" (=yearly contract) worker who has been at the same company for five consecutive years on a permanent basis from year 6, or else terminate employment by the end of year 5. This will go into effect for people who have been working at the same place for years at the end of this fiscal year (March 2018). There are still some differences, such as lack of a retirement bonus and there may be some lingering status issues ("tenured" staff traditionally rank higher).