出版社：Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training
摘要：This paper discusses issues of employment policy based on the viewpoint that the labor market should be made more flexible, in order to halt the polarization of regular and non-regular employees and to achieve labor mobility to growth industries without problems of unemployment. To this end, the author will trace the evolution of employment policy concerning the organization of the labor market. Taking the harsh employment environment after World War II as a starting point, it will be shown that efforts to tackle immediate issues could be said to have developed into a basic system, and that the external labor mar- ket was insufficiently developed due to improvements in the employment en- vironment caused by corporate labor demand in the period of high-level eco- nomic growth. As Japanese-style employment practices became established, fluidity between the internal labor market comprising regular employees and the external labor market comprising non-regular employees was impaired. As a result, even at the stage of employment adjustment by companies, there was no alternative but to choose policies that supported the maintenance of em- ployment by companies rather than supporting labor mobility. In this sense, the task at hand is to improve the current working format of unrestricted regu- lar employees, or in other words, to reform regular employment. Future em- ployment policy should include measures such as supporting the introduction of restricted regular employment systems and making use of agency business by increasing the flexibility of worker dispatch systems.
