![]() ![]() ![]() Easy to fire, these chronic part-timers are absorbing the shock of Japan's downturn: The government estimates that 158,000 have lost their jobs since October. Japan's economy has produced more than 17 million Hiroki Iwabuchis - "non-regular" workers toiling in part-time, contract or temporary-agency jobs. But "I blame myself" for squandering an opportunity for full-time employment. Now 26, he's been locked out of full-time work ever since, laboring in a succession of go-nowhere jobs: working for a moving company, trying Internet sales, handling frozen pork for a meatpacker, sticking lids on printer cartridges for Canon, never earning much more than $24,000 a year. That cost him a job that was waiting for him at a publishing company. He ended his final semester three days short of the required attendance, was barred from graduating and forced to re-enroll for another term. Playing hooky set off a chain reaction that ended Iwabuchi's career before it began. During his final weeks at Tohoku University of Art & Design in Yamagata, he regularly skipped an architectural design class to do something he loved: produce a documentary film about his senior year. "It's a disastrous situation," Honda says. ![]() Now that Japan's economy has sunk back into recession - output fell at a terrifying 12.7% annual pace in fourth-quarter 2008 - Honda and other analysts fear a repeat of the "employment Ice Age" of the 1990s, which froze a generation of graduates out of full-time employment. Students who don't have jobs waiting at graduation risk getting stuck with a lifetime of low-paying, dead-end employment. That's because Japanese companies typically hire only fresh graduates they can indoctrinate in their corporate cultures, figuring anyone with experience elsewhere might bring bad habits. "Whether they get a job when they graduate decides their whole life," says Yuki Honda, a professor at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Education. In Japan, it's sending shivers across the country, raising fears that another "Lost Generation" of young Japanese will be locked out of good jobs forever. Japanese companies, contending with plummeting sales and shriveling profits, are withdrawing job offers to university and high school seniors.Īnywhere else, the news might be shrugged off as the predictable consequence of an economic collapse. TOKYO - Hundreds of young Japanese are getting pink slips before they even start work.
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