2017 Volume 8 Issue 3 Pages 62-78
Along with the development of welfare states, the public sector has played a significant role in integrating women into better employment and promoting gender equality. By contrast, the size of the female workforce in the public sector in Japan has been small, and both national and local governments are not proactive employers of women. However, childcare teachers have been an exception. Local governments were major employers by the mid―1990s and these teachers were organized by public sector unions. Through employment in the public sector, they have, to some degree, earned public recognition as workers in a respectable occupation for women with fair employment conditions. Nevertheless, their occupational status and employment conditions have been undermined not only by the transformation of public sector employment in the 2000s. The question is why and how this on―going degradation and deterioration of care work have been socially and politically justified. First, I show that both the national and local governments have been preparing for a policy shift since the early 1970s by diminishing their role to set the working conditions for childcare teachers in the public sector as the reference point for the working conditions of childcare teachers as a whole. Second, taking the case of the revised pay scale in Osaka City, I analyze its policy process and the downward pressure on the pay rates of public sector childcare teachers exerted by the pay rates of those in the private sector, where there is a large gender disparity and pay is lower than the average for the industry as a whole. In this review, I argue that the government is now taking the role of reproducing unequal gender relations in care work by both rejecting the gender equal route that could be taken through public sector employment and concealing the gender bias built into Japan’s “Promoting Women’s Active Participation” policy.
Annals of the Society for the Study of Social Policy
