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Dispatched and Displaced: Rethinking Employment and Welfare Protection in Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Stephanie Assmann  and
Sebastian Maslow
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Abstract

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The Hibiya Tent Village set up during New Year 2008/09 where 500 temporary workers gathered to seek food and shelter after their sudden job losses revealed the gradual process of deregulation of Japan's labor market that has taken place since the Koizumi administration and culminated in the revision of the Labor Dispatch Law in 2004. The work of the political scientist Margarita Estévez-Abe which describes the evolution of an employment-based welfare arrangement favoring particular corporate interest groups of the former ruling party LDP while excluding growing numbers of temporary workers from efficient welfare protection serves as an initial theoretical framework of our analysis. We augment our analysis with recent data on the re-regulation of the Japanese labor market such as the introduction of emergency employment measures after the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2008, a re-regulation of the Labor Dispatch Law, an improved integration of particular employment groups and reforms of the employment insurance and the part-time law in order to show that Japan under the DPJ is gradually moving towards implementing a more balanced welfare system which seeks to stabilize employment conditions and enable greater numbers of temporary workers to access welfare protection.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 15 , April 2010 , e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2010

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