UNIQLO start to accept college freshman as employee
On your mark, get set, go! At the last semester in third year in university, students start looking for a job at the same time like a track race. They wear a black recruit suit, go to briefing session, sit in front of a computer staring on the screen, and send hundreds of application format to popular companies. This is what traditional job hunting looks like in Japan. However, the situation is about to change.
Before looking at the current changes, let’s have an overview on Japan traditional recruit system which is distinctive from ones of foreign countries. Japan has a quite unique employment system compared with other foreign countries, lifetime employment and grad hiring. To explain these two, firstly, Lifetime employment is the style that the companies take care of employees for all of their life, usually difficult to fire, and contains various public welfare services. Another characteristic is the mechanism that avoids firing workers even when the company gets into poor business performance. All workers are required to do after-hours work. When the company suffers, by cutting the time of after-hours works, even if the pay for the each person decreases, employment itself can be ensured. It can be said that after-hours work functions as a safety absorber. Secondly, Grad hiring is some sort of common practice that companies hire fresh college grads prior to the others. This practice is strongly connected to structure of lifetime employment which described above. Companies employ people immediately after their graduation, than take care of them kindly till they become 75 and retire the company. Traditional style of employment that is supported by the two systems; lifetime employment and grad hiring, has defined and protected the people. The company teaches new worker ABC of business and raises them into good worker, coordinates insurance, public welfare, the way of spending time on vacation, and even life. In addition, these two systems have played the role in securing civilian’s life, and remained unemployment rate low in the period of post war economic growth. In some sense, it had a similar function as a social security service that generally the government has. [data which shows the ratio of cost for social security to whole government budget]
On the contrary, this system has been often criticized especially since the economic growth halted. Once the economic turn in to recession, the system which is designed in former context of revenue expansion cannot work well anymore. Firstly, companies begin to cut off the personnel expenditure. Non-regular employees such as part-time workers and temporary workers increase since the traditional full-fledged employment cost a lot of money. Companies have less leeway to train new workers after the employment. In addition, it is often indicated that traditional system forces uniformed style or value of life toward individual workers. It did not consider as a problem when married males were dominant in the office, but today traditional style: wives stay home husbands go work, is just one of options. For example, there are cases like wife work and husband do family chores, or both wife and husband go for work and so on. One more controversial issue should be introduced in order to argue following content, Relationship between grad hiring and university education. Earliness of the start line of job-hunting is frequently argued since it seriously disturbs a study in university. In Japan university students in fourth grade scarcely come to the university. Further, someone illustrates the system of grad hiring as “the train which comes only once in the lifetime”. It implies that one who missed the train should bare a handy cap for all of his life. This might sound quite unnatural for people who live in western countries because taking time after graduation to decide which company to join in or changing job frequently are just ordinary things for those people. However, now it seems something interesting is happening, totally unexpected for foreigners and even Japanese.
In year to come, students will start job hunting just after they enter the college. UNIQLO [Fastretailing corporation]; well-known clothing company, has begun new system of recruitment available to every grade, every year. A student who passes the examination will be employed as a part-time worker and the job training will be offered at the same time. UNIQLO will employ the student after the graduation.
What will this extreme earliness of jo-bunting start line cause? To analyze this is the main theme of this paper. UNIQLO’s new recruit system will change rigid style of job hunting in Japan drastically, benefit both students and companies.
