1st Edition
Women's Employment in Japan The Experience of Part-time Workers
The low status accorded to part-time workers in Japan has resulted in huge inequalities in the workplace. This book examines the problem in-depth using case-study investigations in Japanese workplaces, and reveals the extent of the inequality. It shows how many part-time workers, most of whom are women, are concentrated in low paid, low skilled, poorly unionised service sector jobs. Part-time workers in Japan work hours equivalent to, or greater than, full-time workers, but receive lower financial and welfare benefits than their full-time colleagues. Overall, the book demonstrates that the way part-time work is constructed in Japan reinforces and institutionalises the sexual division of labour.
Biography
Kaye Broadbent lectures in the School of Industrial Relations, Griffith University. She co-edited Employment Relations in the Asia Pacific: Changing Approaches (2000). She has been a visiting researcher at the Insitute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. Her areas of interest include gender, work and unions in a comparative context.
'Women's Employment in Japan gives a detailed exposition of how part-time work in Japan is culturally and institutionally structured as the work of married women. ... It presents a great deal of valuable information that is not easily accessible eslewhere in the English-language literature.' - The Journal of Asian Studies
