- 著者
-
小谷 真千代
- 出版者
- 一般社団法人 人文地理学会
- 雑誌
- 人文地理 (ISSN:00187216)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.66, no.4, pp.330-351, 2014 (Released:2018-01-27)
- 参考文献数
- 108
- 被引用文献数
-
3
Since the 1970s, neoliberalist deregulation and increased flexibility in the labor market have led to increasingly expansive use of labor market intermediaries (LMIs) between employers and employees in many sectors. LMIs not only eliminate mismatch in the labor market, but also play an active market-making role. In Japan, one of these LMIs, referred to here as ‘labor contractors,’ grew through the employment of Japanese-Brazilian labor with the sharp growth of the electronics and auto industries in the 1970s to 1980s.The purpose of this study is to examine the process of market expansion of labor contractors focusing on geographic sectorial expansion strategies, from the point of view of LMIs as an active agency. This study introduces the case of Minokamo City, Gifu Prefecture, a city with a high ratio of indirect employment in manufacturing and the use of migrant workers.Following their deregulation in 1952, LMIs in Japan have expanded into various sectors including manufacturing. More recent neoliberalist deregulation has generally liberalized LMI’s businesses, developing favorable environments for them.In the context of the labor shortage in the electronics and auto industries in the 1980s, labor contractors, such as LMIs in manufacturing, geographically expanded their labor sources to include Brazil. In the recession of the 1990s, labor supply destinations were expanded to lower-paying and more volatile sectors, where Japanese workers were unwilling to work, and geographically to the peripheral areas including Minokamo City, one particular city that had experienced a labor shortage due to rapid industrialization in the 1980s.After 1992, labor contractors supplied extensive Japanese Brazilian labor to manufacturing plants in Minokamo City, but the worldwide financial crunch in 2008 affected their market. As a result, they expanded their markets by geographic sectorial strategies in order to overcome the crisis.The case of Company A reveals that labor contractors could survive the crisis by expanding their market to lower-paying and more volatile sectors for unemployed Japanese Brazilians in the electronics and auto industries. Although the population of Japanese Brazilians greatly decreased, labor contractors continued expanding their market by looking for people who could assume the roles of Japanese Brazilians.Moreover, those business activities of labor contractors consist of a relationship beyond the triangular relationship between the LMI, employee, and client. Their business became well established in Minokamo through economic relations around residences for labor or parking spaces for labor contractors, participation in the local community, and establishment of opportunities for certification, etc. Labor contractors and local actors interact in diverse ways, and their relationships have deepened following the crisis.The businesses of labor contractors lead to the expansion of a short term labor market, which is preferred by neoliberalism, and to the expansion of precarious work situations. The neoliberalist labor market reforms since the 1990s obviously have driven the business growth of labor contractors, and consequently they shape neoliberalist restructuring in the labor market. Consequently, this market expansion by labor contractors in Minokamo City could be seen as a neoliberalist restructuring process.