抄録
The purpose of this paper is to examine the process and impact of the mass replacement of high school graduate job finders by foreign workers. To date, little attention has been paid to this subject. One reason is that the main concern of labor researchers has been the replacement of irregular employees, who are usually middle-aged married women. Another is that researchers on the transition from high school to work have mainly focused on the linkage between employers and high schools and the mechanism of the selection and allocation of students. However, high school graduate job finders and foreign workers compete with each other in terms of jobs (especially manual labor in the manufacturing sector) so much that they have effects on each other in many respects. Therefore, the two groups should not be analyzed separately. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methods and using Tochigi prefecture, where the numbers of both foreign workers and jobless high school graduates (mugyo-sha) have been increasing, this paper clarifies the following four points: (1) The recruitment needs of high school level skilled workers are not met in the manufacturing companies with under 100 employees. (2) 20 to 30 percent of manufacturing companies with over 100 employees employ foreign workers. (3) The larger the employee-size is, the larger is the number of manufacturing companies adopting foreign workers through indirect employment and the larger is the number of them per company. (4) While the magnitude of the mass replacement described above needs to be further analyzed, it is no doubt an acute occurrence. This paper demonstrates that such replacement brings about the job hierarchy formed by ethnicity and the intensive selection of a smaller number of candidates for training to be junior supervisors. It is thus necessary that such impact to be closely investigated.
