Non-regular Workers’ Job Satisfaction and Their Status as Key Workforces

Abstract

The influence of qualitative mainstreaming of non-regular employees upon their degree of job satisfaction has been studied mainly based on part-timers. The qualitative mainstreaming means part of the part-timers work as same volume and or same kind of job as regular employees. The past studies have focused on the fact that these part-timers do not find satisfaction in the wage differences with regular employees. However, there are several kinds of non-regular employees other than part-timers in the Japanese labor market, such as contract employees, temporary agency workers and so called quasi-part-timers whose working hours are almost the same as those of regular employees. And the past studies have not sufficiently focused on the matter considering the diversification of employment status.

In this paper, using the micro data which was collected by JILPT, the degree of job satisfaction of some types of non-regular employees is analyzed. It will be considered to what extent the personnel policies of individual businesses and the quantitative or qualitative mainstreaming affect the degree of satisfaction of contract employees, short-time part-timers and long-time part-timers.

The main fact findings are as below;

Firstly, company personnel policies toward non-regular employees may lower the level of satisfaction. This is proved from the low level of satisfaction of non-regular employees working at companies with such systems as a “Non-regular to Regular conversion system” for contract workers and training policies for long-time part-timers. One background that can be imagined is that such company plans for the non-regular employees do not cover all such workers, and discontent may arise towards those particular non-regular employees that are eligible for such plans. Secondly, the results using the non-regular employees’ own self-awareness toward the nature of their job as an indicator of a qualitative mainstreaming ended up being cleared. Specifically, contract employees conscious of themselves doing “non routine work” or the “same work as regular employees,” have low satisfaction with job as a whole, wages and training.