Abstract
It is believed that there has been a rapid increase in the number of people working from home due to the recent widespread use of crowdsourcing. 'Telework Population Factual Investigation' carried out by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism estimates that 21.3% of workers are teleworkers as of the end of 2012, and about 9.3 million of them are teleworkers working at home. However, teleworker is defined by the national statistics as those who fulfill the following 4 conditions: Those who earn revenue from their regular jobs; those who work with ICT tools such as e-mail; those who have more than one work places or one work place outside their company's office which are equipped with ICT tools; those who are working more than 8 hours a week at workplace outside their company. Teleworkers working at home are those who work with ICT tools for more than one minute per week at home as well as meet all of the above four criteria. Therefore, most of the workers who work at home through crowdsourcing are not regarded as teleworker. Considering change in social situation, this article proposes a revision to definition of teleworker which was given more than 10 years ago.