NEW RISKS, OLD WELFARE Japanese university students, work-related anxieties and sources of support
Not unlike many European societies in the 1970s and 1980s, Japan went through a rapid process of postindustrialization in the 1990s and 2000s. Whilst the implications were wide-ranging, young (would-be) labour market entrants were among the most affected groups: youth unemployment more than doubled, as did the prevalence of non-standard employment. Simultaneously, how to remain in employment and achieve work-life balance became serious concerns for women especially. This article builds on existing research as well as interviews with 38 university students in Kyoto to capture key features of such 'new risks' in Japan. Alongside intriguing gender and class differences, we find that the short- and long-term anxieties many students face have not yet been countered with public policy innovations. Emerging support measures outside the context of the family and the company remain not only inadequate but also largely unknown to students.
Overtime Activists Take on Corporate Titans: Toyota, McDonald's and Japan's Work Hour Controversy
Japan’s long work hours generate high human and economic costs. Even between 2002 and 2008, when Japan enjoyed a growing economy, the media regularly reported cases of workers felled by strokes and heart attacks or driven to depression or suicide by unrelenting job demands. Work hours are a major impediment to equal opportunity, since working mothers cannot devote the long hours expected of professional employees and so must opt for low-paying, low-status jobs. Family life is affected because many younger persons postpone or abandon hopes of marriage and children as they sacrifi ce personal lives to stay employed. Further, while long work hours and karō (overwork) are common in many countries, notably the US and Britain, in Japan karōshi (death from overwork) has been offi cially recognized as a medico-legal phenomenon for two decades, and has spawned a social movement to combat it.1 Japan’s employers and conservative policymakers have long held that the country’s pattern of incremental and consensual policy making is effective in improving employment conditions, while avoiding the economic rigidities of Western nations. The result since the 1950s has been labour legislation that consistently lags behind labour market trends, or seeks merely to defuse complaints from trade partners that poor labour standards constitute unfair trade practices.2 Work-hour-related policy making closely matches this pattern: long work hours have provoked consistent attempts at reform since the late 1960s, and reformers made several signifi cant revisions to labour laws between 1987 and 1993, but failed to signifi cantly affect actual practice. While many large manufacturing fi rms did reduce work hours around this
Historias de mi barrio: contemporary art in a community at high risk of social exclusion
Abstract Historias de mi barrio is a piece of pedagogic research aimed at highlighting the way art can articulate the relationship between the educational context and a neighbourhood at high risk of social exclusion. The starting point for this study was to ask whether this type of research, centred around the arts, was suitable in complex contexts and whether it might eventually lead to pedagogic improvement. The results gathered, and indeed the work carried out by the artists and university lecturers involved, together with pupils 6–12 years old and their instructors in a state school, provide evidence of a positive answer – and notably of the necessity of knowing about the socio-economic reality of the student cohort when planning learning projects and of the importance of the arts as a crucial element in education.