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▼ Hurdles to Full-time Employment
- Category:Other
The Yomiuri Shimbun
This is the third and final installment of a series.
At the Co-op Kamobe supermarket in Kochi city, store manager Fumiya Araki, 53, gets behind a cash register in the evenings when the number of shoppers increases. This is necessitated by a chronic labor shortage of part-time college students, who account for about 20 percent of the about 80 employees at the supermarket.
Until recently, the supermarket has secured its necessary labor force of student part-timers by having the current ones introduce younger students to take their place. However, today’s university students tend to prefer jobs with higher hourly wages, such as night work in the restaurant industry. “I can’t think of seasonal menus [for the deli corner set up six months ago] because I can barely keep up with the work at hand,” Araki said.
Kochi Co-op, which operates the supermarket, plans to raise hourly wages for part-time workers this year for the second consecutive year. It is also considering implementing a system that promotes experienced part-time workers to regular employees.
This is the third and final installment of a series.
At the Co-op Kamobe supermarket in Kochi city, store manager Fumiya Araki, 53, gets behind a cash register in the evenings when the number of shoppers increases. This is necessitated by a chronic labor shortage of part-time college students, who account for about 20 percent of the about 80 employees at the supermarket.
Until recently, the supermarket has secured its necessary labor force of student part-timers by having the current ones introduce younger students to take their place. However, today’s university students tend to prefer jobs with higher hourly wages, such as night work in the restaurant industry. “I can’t think of seasonal menus [for the deli corner set up six months ago] because I can barely keep up with the work at hand,” Araki said.
Kochi Co-op, which operates the supermarket, plans to raise hourly wages for part-time workers this year for the second consecutive year. It is also considering implementing a system that promotes experienced part-time workers to regular employees.
It is ready to “use any and all means necessary,” its human resources manager said.
Big firms struggling
Domestic employment has improved and is now at a historical high, due to improved business performance under the Abenomics economic policies and the fact that, since 2012, baby boomers have started to reach the retirement age of 65 and are beginning to leave their companies.
The effective ratio of job openings to job applicants in Kochi Prefecture for November last year exceeded one for the first time since January 1963, when data was first recorded.
Securing human resources is also a problem for major companies. Seeking to offset the large number of baby boomers leaving the company, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. is increasing the number of women working in its steelworks.
Of the 1,420 new employees assigned to the company’s production sites in fiscal 2016, a total of 228 are women. Previously, the number of women working on production sites was almost zero, as the jobs were strongly identified as male roles.
To make the job more comfortable and attractive for women, a 24-hour nursery was opened at the company’s Oita Works in Oita city in April this year. “I was able to return to work easily. It also helps that it takes almost no time to pick up my child,” said Mutsumi Sakakibara, 28, who drops her 1-year-old off at the nursery and works on the research and development of automotive steel plates.
High skills required
It is not all good news, however, from the perspective of job-seekers.
“I guess no luck today either,” a man in his 30s muttered to himself in mid-May as he checked the latest job postings on the bulletin board at the entrance of the Kochi Public Employment Security Office in Kochi city.
The man’s contract for a distribution job expired at the end of March. He wants to work as a regular employee with a steady income, but there is less than one job offer a week that meets his criteria.
He has had interviews with three companies, but feels that “the skills and experience required are high and it is, as usual, a buyer’s market.”
Although the effective ratio of job openings to job applicants nationwide for March was 1.3, it remains at 0.82 for job offers for regular employment.
Because many companies lack confidence in the future of the economy, they are reluctant to increase their number of full-time employees and would rather make up shortfalls with non-regular employees.
While the number of regular employees has remained almost constant at around 33 million for the past decade, the number of non-regular employees has jumped from 17 million to 20 million. This is one of the reasons why consumption is so sluggish despite the seemingly good employment situation.
After just two weeks, a 45-year-old Chiba woman working as a dispatched employee left the systems company where she started working in April. She thought she would get involved in advanced work such as systems development at a new company. Her goal was to improve her skills, but she was only given simple tasks like handling documents including estimation sheet checks.
In her eyes, the company is seeking to “force more and more clerical work onto temporary employees without increasing the number of regular employees.”
Only temporary hiring
Companies on the hiring side are bracing themselves for a global economic slowdown.
In Minami-Sanriku, Miyagi Prefecture, which was devastated by the tsunami that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake, preparations to move houses and shops to higher elevations are underway. However, executives of construction companies in the area calmly view the reconstruction boom and say they cannot hire new people because the jobs will be gone in one or two years.
Wage increases to secure human resources will have future repercussions in increased costs of maintaining the current workforce. Executives warn that businesses in the town are mainly small and midsized. If reconstruction demand returns to normal and there is an economic slowdown at the same time, they will not have the financial strength to survive, they say.
This year, a midsized company involved in the manufacture of automotive parts in Higashi-Osaka, Osaka Prefecture, has stopped recruiting full-time employees and decided to hire only a small number of dispatch employees.
At the company, which has roughly 100 employees, there have been more and more years in which more temporary workers were hired than regular employees due to lackluster business results recently. It did employ five regular employees last year, but the strong yen and falling stock prices that started this year increased uncertainties about future orders, forcing the company not to hire any new regular employees this year.
The technical standards demanded by clients go up almost every year and companies that cannot keep up will not receive new orders.
These technologies are supported by elderly skilled craftsmen who are familiar with the production lines. They have taught their techniques to young regular employees on the job, and the young and mid-career employees have applied and honed those skills over time.
However, since temporary employees leave after a certain period of time, they cannot be taught critical skills or technologies. “At this rate, the company will become nothing but a hollow shell,” a hiring manager lamented.
The Abe Cabinet has touted its “improvement of employment,” but both employees and businesses have yet to feel the promised effects.
Big firms struggling
Domestic employment has improved and is now at a historical high, due to improved business performance under the Abenomics economic policies and the fact that, since 2012, baby boomers have started to reach the retirement age of 65 and are beginning to leave their companies.
The effective ratio of job openings to job applicants in Kochi Prefecture for November last year exceeded one for the first time since January 1963, when data was first recorded.
Securing human resources is also a problem for major companies. Seeking to offset the large number of baby boomers leaving the company, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. is increasing the number of women working in its steelworks.
Of the 1,420 new employees assigned to the company’s production sites in fiscal 2016, a total of 228 are women. Previously, the number of women working on production sites was almost zero, as the jobs were strongly identified as male roles.
To make the job more comfortable and attractive for women, a 24-hour nursery was opened at the company’s Oita Works in Oita city in April this year. “I was able to return to work easily. It also helps that it takes almost no time to pick up my child,” said Mutsumi Sakakibara, 28, who drops her 1-year-old off at the nursery and works on the research and development of automotive steel plates.
High skills required
It is not all good news, however, from the perspective of job-seekers.
“I guess no luck today either,” a man in his 30s muttered to himself in mid-May as he checked the latest job postings on the bulletin board at the entrance of the Kochi Public Employment Security Office in Kochi city.
The man’s contract for a distribution job expired at the end of March. He wants to work as a regular employee with a steady income, but there is less than one job offer a week that meets his criteria.
He has had interviews with three companies, but feels that “the skills and experience required are high and it is, as usual, a buyer’s market.”
Although the effective ratio of job openings to job applicants nationwide for March was 1.3, it remains at 0.82 for job offers for regular employment.
Because many companies lack confidence in the future of the economy, they are reluctant to increase their number of full-time employees and would rather make up shortfalls with non-regular employees.
While the number of regular employees has remained almost constant at around 33 million for the past decade, the number of non-regular employees has jumped from 17 million to 20 million. This is one of the reasons why consumption is so sluggish despite the seemingly good employment situation.
After just two weeks, a 45-year-old Chiba woman working as a dispatched employee left the systems company where she started working in April. She thought she would get involved in advanced work such as systems development at a new company. Her goal was to improve her skills, but she was only given simple tasks like handling documents including estimation sheet checks.
In her eyes, the company is seeking to “force more and more clerical work onto temporary employees without increasing the number of regular employees.”
Only temporary hiring
Companies on the hiring side are bracing themselves for a global economic slowdown.
In Minami-Sanriku, Miyagi Prefecture, which was devastated by the tsunami that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake, preparations to move houses and shops to higher elevations are underway. However, executives of construction companies in the area calmly view the reconstruction boom and say they cannot hire new people because the jobs will be gone in one or two years.
Wage increases to secure human resources will have future repercussions in increased costs of maintaining the current workforce. Executives warn that businesses in the town are mainly small and midsized. If reconstruction demand returns to normal and there is an economic slowdown at the same time, they will not have the financial strength to survive, they say.
This year, a midsized company involved in the manufacture of automotive parts in Higashi-Osaka, Osaka Prefecture, has stopped recruiting full-time employees and decided to hire only a small number of dispatch employees.
At the company, which has roughly 100 employees, there have been more and more years in which more temporary workers were hired than regular employees due to lackluster business results recently. It did employ five regular employees last year, but the strong yen and falling stock prices that started this year increased uncertainties about future orders, forcing the company not to hire any new regular employees this year.
The technical standards demanded by clients go up almost every year and companies that cannot keep up will not receive new orders.
These technologies are supported by elderly skilled craftsmen who are familiar with the production lines. They have taught their techniques to young regular employees on the job, and the young and mid-career employees have applied and honed those skills over time.
However, since temporary employees leave after a certain period of time, they cannot be taught critical skills or technologies. “At this rate, the company will become nothing but a hollow shell,” a hiring manager lamented.
The Abe Cabinet has touted its “improvement of employment,” but both employees and businesses have yet to feel the promised effects.
- May 31, 2016
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