In recent years, non-regular employees have been switched to full-time employees on a large scale in the life insurance industry. In addition, the employment management category has repeatedly been changed, the non-career track was abolished at major life insurance companies. Although classification according to range of work relocations remains, all employees became career-track staffs who are likely to be promoted. This study examined the changes of the personnel system, its background and logic, changes in the substance, and the impact on female labor from the case study of traditional life insurance companies.

Some previous studies have argued that it is efficient to create management categories and develop human resources by each category. However, it is not efficient to fix the expected roles in each employment management category in advance. This study finds integration of employment management categories try to “exercises” women’s agency. It can be said that this is a new type of women’s utilization policy that repositions women as “subjects” and encourages them to demonstrate their abilities in their “will.”

In September 2017, the Credit Saison Co., Ltd. introduced the “Personnel system common to all employees.” It was a groundbreaking personnel system reform that eliminated the conventional employment categories of “general employee”, “professional employee”, and “mate employee”. This article examines the reasons why the personnel strategy of employment category abolition was possible, along with the challenges to be faced, focusing on the background, the driving factors, and the effects of the systemic reform. The analysis pays close attention to the new norms that have been shared between management and workers. First, the author analyzes background factors, including changes in the business environment and in the business profit structure. Next, the author sheds light on driving factors, particularly the process of accumulation of experience in nurturing new norms. Finally, regarding the effects of the reform, the author focuses on the employees’ reactions. Based on the above analyses, the paper examines the meaning of “employment category abolition,” and the subsequent problems to be faced.

The creative industry has been characterized by the informalized labor market where short-term project-by-project employment is predominant and few formal labor regulations exist. It is widely acknowledged in the literature that creative workers tend to favor informal governance of work over stable employment and labor protection in the name of work autonomy and self-realization. Critical scholars have shown that informal nature of creative work and workers’ preference for the informality mutually reinforce one another, reproducing the profound work precarity in creative industry. In this context of create work, this article explores how creative workers make sense of and experience the shift in their employment status from a freelancer to a full-time, regular worker. Drawing on in-depth interviews with broadcasting writers at a public broadcaster in South Korea who are given an opportunity to make transitions from freelance contracts to fix-term and to standard employment contracts, this article attempts to theorize the dynamics between work precarity, occupational identity and employment arrangement. We illustrate how writers’ understanding of different types of employment arrangement evolves over time, as they negotiate work precarity, working style and social relations in the context of occupational identity.

Municipal governments in Japan have been using social policy standards as a tool in making public contracts for at least a decade. For example, some public contract ordinances have clauses on wage rates for workers under contract ; these mostly regard construction and civil engineering jobs. On the other hand, some standards concerning disabilities or job creation are adopted in competitive tendering for contracting out services. But fewer municipalities presently have the latter than the former type of ordinance, even though the two types of measures appear to complement each other effectively. This presentation will examine the range of wage rate and employment opportunities among several sectors, showing how these bring about different municipal policies.

This paper considers the possibility of improving wages and working conditions in the construction field through public contract ordinances. First, based on survey results, it confirms the actual conditions of wages and working conditions of construction workers under a multilayered contract structure. Through that analysis, the necessity of public contract ordinances becomes clear. Nevertheless, the establishment of public contract ordinances has made little nationwide progress, as the number of local governments with public contract regulations has failed to rise above the 50―some level. What is the reason for this situation ? What challenges face local governments ? We will consider what conditions are necessary for the establishment of public contract ordinances, including the experiences of local governments that have failed to establish such ordinances.

This paper aims to provide an absolute-standard perspective about setting the poverty line in Japan, where the household income has been declining over the past decades.

We estimated a poverty standard using the Engel method, developed and adopted for calculating the minimum living standard for Social Assistance in Japan in the 1960s. Subsequently, we compared the estimated poverty standard with the recent Social Assistance standard, as well as the relative poverty line.

Our analysis showed that the estimated poverty standard strongly depends on the calculation of food expenditure and the estimation models of the Engel coefficient. Therefore, the results vary in the range 140,000-232,000 yen per month for couples with one child, which covers the social assistance benefit for that family.

The Engel method requires deciding how the definition of nutritional food products and their price should be calculated, as well as which regression model is more appropriate. It is too early to conclude whether the relative poverty line is lower than the absolute line by the Engel method as of 2009, but we can see the necessity of continuing to verify whether the absolute poverty line is ensured by the social assistance system.

The skills used by creators in the animation industry are not expressed in an objective form, but they have the shared understanding of their professional skills among their peers. By employing the notion of “floating norms,” which means that the criteria for evaluation changes while judgments on worker’s skill or value are appropriate for each situation, this paper clarifies the inner workings of competence as understood by animation creators based on their narratives. As a result, it became clear that directors had a different set of skills due to their career trajectories. Directors who previously worked as production managers or compositions had experienced overseeing the entire process. Directors who were in charge of animators specialized in drawing and visual expression. Furthermore, each animator’s skill was understandable as a form of differentiating themselves from others. Based on these findings, it was pointed out that even if the skills were not objectified and were based on relationships, skill formations in on the job training has a significance for workers in the post-Fordism.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal how household income affects children’s dietary behavior among high-school students from the point of Food Insecurity. The paper uses children and their parents answered survey data from high school students living in metropolitan Tokyo.

The analysis found that household income indirectly affects the number of skipping meals through the experience of being unable to purchase food and child’s working hours. It also revealed that household income, indirectly and directly, affects child’s food intake by mediating the experience of not being able to purchase food, child’s working hours and mother’s working hours.