青年問題を再定義する : ライフコース変動をめぐる社会経済とポリティクス(<特集>雇用と労働のゆくえ)

抄録

In the last ten years Japanese neo-liberal labor policies have drastically brought about the insecurity of labor conditions and the lifecycle change in youth. As the result of these two changes the existing pattern of socialization became functionless and a new type of the youth question has appeared as follows. As the most important characteristic of the new youth question, first of all, we could appoint that the drastic increase in the non-standard employment, which amounts now to 33% of the whole fulltime laborers aged 15〜24 and to 38% of the female laborers same aged, has made youth labor conditions worse. Labor conditions of and infringements on the non-standard employee having been fixed on low level and many kinds of unfair labor practices having been ignored, youth labor conditions have been reduced as a whole. So the treatment of the youth laborers, both non-standard and standard, is spiraling down. Secondly, the poverty of youth is another youth question that should be forced to take prompt measures urgently. The poverty of youth, which is caused by the quite inadequate wage level about the same as public assistance payment, is on the increase. Youth laborers without the parent's support have no choice but submit tamely to low wage, sometimes lower than public assistance payment. For example day laborers, who are engaged by temporary employment agencies and forms a part of the youth working poor, are a typical case. It might be estimated that the amount of the youth working poor including the latent has reached the million mark at present. The complex and disguising character of youth poverty makes hard to overcome the poverty problem in youth. This complex and disguising character means such poverty as contiguous to the affluence of the consuming society, slight but widespread psychiatric disorders triggered by poverty, the social isolation peculiar to the youth and so forth. By reason that the cultural individualization in Japanese societal culture is extremely potent and the social exclusion mechanism to the youth, both formally and informally, is so powerful, the social isolation of the youth has been reinforced and accelerated in contemporary Japan. These characters could be taken advantage of attributing the responsibility of the youth poverty not to social faults but to the personal incompetence. Third; the characteristic of the lifecycle change in youth, to sum up, consists in the appearance of a pattern of the low grade lifecycle on which many non-standard laborers are forced to be. Contrast to the recommended lifecycle as the supposed standard one, this low grade lifecycle is made up of a not-legitimated transition, low wage job wandering and the makeshift self-support, the low rate of marriage and so forth. Although being regarded simply as a drop out from the legitimated pattern of lifecycle: what a lifecycle should be, this de fact standard for non-standard youth laborers can form, in turn, a perspective and potentials for a better life experience. On the one hand non-standard laborers minimize their aspirations and their wants according with their lifecycle perspective. But on the other hand their strategic behaviors to minimize their hardships also mean a pursuit of a sort of alternative lifecycle: a pursuit that could stand against the neo-liberal labor and transition policy.