The Rise and Fall of Mediated Employment in Export-oriented Localities : Employment Adjustment and Municipal Governments' Countermeasures against Job Loss under the Financial Crisis in Oita Prefecture, Japan

After the breakout of the economic crisis in the fall of 2008, many Japanese manufacturing companies announced a series of organizational restructuring and plant closures. This resulted in many job losses, devastated the local economies that depended on export-oriented industries, and buoyed up the public anxiety for the future. The employment insecurity caused by the economic crisis made us realize the intrinsic problems of mediated employment such as temporary staffing or contract work. Mediated workers have employment contracts with temporary agencies or contract companies and not with the companies where they actually work. Because of the absence of a direct employment contract, mediated workers who lose their jobs do not express opposition to the workplace companies. Japanese companies, in particular, car and electronics manufacturers, aggressively employed mediated labor to deal with the fluctuation of production and to squeeze the labor cost. The upsurge of mediated employment in Japan is closely related to the deregulation process. The distribution of mediated workers in manufacturing shows a similar pattern as the one of total manufacturing workers', indicating the deep penetration of mediated employment in the sector. However, some peripheral localities which are dependant on few large manufacturing companies show singularly high percentage of mediated workers. Two municipalities located in Kyusyu, Japan, Kunisaki city and Kitsuki city in Oita prefecture, are good examples of such locality. At the peripheral locations, manufacturing companies cannot satisfy the labor demand within the commutable area, then, the staffing agencies and contractors mediate the spatial gap between labor demand and supply. In accordance with the inflow of workers, a lot of apartment houses were built in the two municipalities. However, the registered population of them never reflects the change in the locality, because the workers who occasionally migrated to a locality where a job was available tended not to make the residence resister procedure there. When the economic crisis broke out and an excess of labor accrued, it was the mediated workers that first lost their jobs. This revealed that the flexibility of employment, which companies can obtain by utilizing mediated employment, was founded on the workers' risk of an unstable life: the risk was actualized by the economic crisis. Realizing that the job loss was inevitable, some municipal governments, including Kitsuki and Kunisaki city, quickly decided to conduct emergency employment measures. However, the workers responded to the help of municipal governments unexpectedly weakly. The mediated workers who came from outside the localities where they worked did not come there to settle down, but simply to earn a living there. They were merely directed to the locality by the staffing agencies and contractors. Once the jobs had lost, there were no positive reasons to stay there, then they left the locality. It was local governments that primarily reached out and prepare remedial schemes for the mediated workers who lost the jobs. Although the fact itself should be valued, it was also the fact that few workers relied on the help. The spatial scale of workers migration was broader than the spread of safety net by municipal government, which is defined by the territory of the municipalities. The drastic revision of the Worker Dispatch Law is under way; dispatching workers who engaged in manufacturing activities is to be prohibited according to the plan. It should be borne in mind that mediated employment is not merely an irregular and discrete type of employment, but an indispensable institution which is embedded in contemporary labor market. The stand-alone revision of the law, however drastic it will be, is a treatment of symptoms.