How Neoliberalism Created Precarious Labor

 Beginning in the 1970s, China’s economic take-off was characterized by loans to the bank and loans to development. However, when Japan attempted to follow a similar pattern to economic prowess, it backfired by feeding the growth of an economic bubble that burst in the mid-1990s. The resulting economic crisis led corporations to cease investment and cut costs. These cuts in costs translated to a shift from contracted workers to temporary workers with no contracts, no benefits, and low wages. Economic critics are split as to if neoliberalist ideals have risen out of Japan’s economic crisis as a tool of the state, or if they have merely been intensified as youth abandon traditional ideas of labor, family, and success in search of individual success and happiness. I’d argue that although neoliberalist ideology existed in Japan prior to the ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s, neoliberal restructuring in Japan created close to two million youth between the ages of 18 and 34 without full-time work known as Freeters. To supplement this analysis of freeters in Japan, I will use Driscoll’s definition of freeters as “youth who choose to make a living from part time work even after graduating from junior college or University”. While this specific group of precarious labor and the economic context behind Japan’s creation of millions of young, precarious workers only contextualizes Japan, it serves as a vignette of how structural changes in industry and technology led to the creation of a class of workers with no stability in the infrastructure of employment as well as in the larger infrastructure of society. One example of this precarity extending beyond the workplace is the role that Chinese migrant labor plays in China’s massive industrial market. Due to their migratory status and China’s policies on residency and housing, the same migrant workers developing China are often times are residing illegally in the cities that they work in.

“The rise of precarious employment is associated with global economic, political, and social
changes that began in the 1970s and have accelerated since. These changes are
part of an extension of neoliberal ideas and programs that have resulted in
profound transformations, including improvements in technology; rapid
globalization; international competition in product, capital, and labor
markets.

Neoliberal reform in China, Japan,
and South Korea provided a strategy that permitted capitalism to free itself of
the spatial “locks” that constrained its mobility and profitability by breaking
down the borders of labor thus causing labor to compete globally. This global
competition of labor has led to low-wage work with the working poor, insecurity
in the workplace, lack of tenure with an employer, high risks of illness and
injury, and a dearth of social protections offered to the workers. 

Precarious labor here is defined as the uncertainty, instability, and insecurity of work in which employees bear
the risks of work and receive limited social benefits and statutory entitlements. This is seen in both the formal and informal sectors of economies in the developed and developing countries of East Asia. The main organizational
strategy that has created precarious labor is the outsourcing of labor to migrants or using a temporary workforce rather than contracted workers to reduce internal costs. 

Hansen argues that although neoliberalism is creating a precariat in East Asia, neoliberalist ideology also has positive impacts for the precariat that it’s creating by shifting their definition of worth as citizens from the state, to worth as valuable actors in the market. Hansen goes on to explain that precarity can be ameliorated by instituting a degree of social protections much like what is provided to workers in the West. In this path we will explore whether Hansen’s theory of ameliorating precarious labor holds up.

1.)Driscoll - "Debt and denunciation in post-bubble Japan: on the two freeters." Cultural Critique 65.1 (2007): 164-187.
2.)Hansen - Hansen, Anders Sybrandt. "Learning the knacks of actually existing capitalism: Young Beijing migrants and the problem of value." Critique of Anthropology32.4 (2012): 415-434.
3.)Kalleberg - Kalleberg, Arne L., and Kevin Hewison. "Precarious work and the challenge for Asia." American Behavioral Scientist 57.3 (2013): 271-288.

1. Worth of the Body
2. Tensions Between Workers & Market/Society
3. What Does Precarious Labor Actually Look Like?
4. Suicide in East Asia