The proportion of non-regular workers in Japan, including part-time
workers, temporary agency workers, contract employees and others, has
recently risen to 35％ of the total labor force. Although the majority of
non-regular employees are part-time workers, the most striking increase
has been in the number and ratio of agency temporary workers. Of the
reasons behind this, the repeated changes to the Worker Dispatch Law
and the subsequent liberalization of staffing services are the most important. These changes have caused problems, such the replacement of fulltime
employees by agency workers, “net cafe refugees” whose low pay as
daily agency workers forces them to stay overnight at cheap Internet cafes,
disguised contract labor, the re-dispatch of workers to third parties,
withholding of sundry expenses from wages, and deteriorating working
conditions in general. These problems are related not only to the deregulation
of temporary work but also to fundamental contradictions of the temporary staffing system. In the first section in this essay, I examine the processes that led to
the 1985 Worker Dispatch Law. I make clear that although the law originally
permitted the dispatch of limited works including unskilled labor,
such as filing and building maintenance, its consequence has been the full liberalization of staffing services in recent years. The second section analyzes
the rapid increase of temporary agency workers from 0.4 million
two decades ago to 4 million today. Here I focus on the massive termination
of agency workers in the manufacturing industry after the economic
crisis in autumn 2008. The third section and conclusion argue that from
the beginning the Worker Dispatch Law attacked the conceptual divide
that separated the concept of employment from the use of labor power. The result was the liberation of indirect employment, which had been
prohibited by the Employment Security Law of 1947.
引用
彦根論叢, 第382号, pp. 27-55
The Hikone Ronso, No.382, pp. 27-55
労働者派遣制度と雇用概念（成瀬龍夫博士退職記念論文集）
382 morioka.pdf
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