Youth labor movements in Japan: Their conditions and characteristics

The majority of labor organizations in Japan have been company unions,
which have mainly middle-aged full-time male employees. In contrast,
in the youth labor movement (YLM), which has emerged since 2000, union
members are not only regular workers but non-regular workers,
job-seekers, and hikikomori (people withdrawn from society). They have
united outside of companies and have achieved a new solidarity. Based
on statistical data and qualitative research of these union members,
this report attempts to clarify the conditions and characteristics of
the YLM in Japan.

In Japan, it becomes more difficult for workers to transition from
non-regular employment to regular employment as they get older. People
who could not find decent jobs in the economically depressed period of
the 1990s are in their thirties or forties now. Additionally, despite
economic growth in the mid-2000s, the number of young non-regular
workers has been increasing since that time. Therefore, being trapped
in non-regular work is a problem both of young adults and of older
adults stuck in a kind of extended adolescence. Representing older,
fulltime workers, existing unions have been uninterested in this
problem. So, the YLM has occurred as a movement by general unions
outside of companies.

The solidarities of the YLM have two characteristics. First, work is
not regarded as the basis of solidarity; unemployed people, hikikomori
and so on are included in the unions. Second, YLM members define
themselves not as workers but as a "precariat."  Nevertheless, this
broad self-definition does not preclude conflicts between individual
and collective identities.  Using K. McDonald’s concept of “experience
movement,” we can see that the conflicts are an attempt to reconstruct
the movement as a place where people can struggle both to find their
own subjectivity and to acknowledge the experience of each other in a
shared time and place.