Abstract
This article tries to trace one aspect of changes taking place in the employment system by proposing a new understanding of employment. Contrary to the commonly accepted view that in the typical employment a worker offers a certain amount of work in a fixed time, we assume that workers are under the control of employers even when they are not engaged in work. The work of domestic servants is the most representative of all-day control by employers. Even factory and office workers whose working time is defined in employment handbooks are under control of their companies in their leisure time. They are not allowed to work for other employers and bound to obey company rules such as those concerning trade secrets when they are not occupied with their work. Let us name this type of employment as all-day employment. The work of day laborers is quite different from domestic servants and company employees in that they are committed to employers only for a limited time in a day. Their work will be classified as limited time employment in contrast to all-day employment. The new type of working style found among managers and engineers whose working time is not clearly defined will be regarded as a developed type of all-day employment. They are rather free in choosing their working time but expected to work any time once they have to do. While all-day employment increases its importance in a managerial hierarchy to such extent that the traditional personnel device of time control has almost lost its weight in the management of managers, quite different type of employment which imposes rather strict time control upon workers has increased in number. Part-time work is a case in point. They are close to day laborers in accepting strict time control but different from laborers in terms of continuity in their current job. And contemporary factory workers who are also under stricter time control nowadays become much more like part-timers in terms of limited working time. In place of the age-old two tier strata system of labor market consisting of factory/office workers on the one hand and laborers on the other, we now have a new combination of managers/engineers in all-day employment and factory workers/part-timers in limited time employment. New juxtaposition of all-day employment and limited time employment might be caused by the fact that when one members of a family is engaged in all-day employment quite often other members are forced to limit their work time in order to allocate certain amount of their time to household activities. But in case where both husband and wife are engaged in all-day employment, they sometimes think it difficult to find some time to perform household activities such as taking care of their parents. With the increasing competition among companies putting more stress on responsibilities of managers, all-day employment aggravates difficulties in attaining the compatibility of work and family.
