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Recruit to set up new firm to help retailers find part-timers

One powerful trend we’ve seen over the past fifteen years is the increase in the number of part-time workers as a percentage of the overall workforce. Two strong forces have been behind the establishment of this trend: in the 1990s companies were suffering from the burst of the asset bubble and simply needed to cut costs, even as the size of the workforce swelled. Over the past five years, companies have increased capital spending, but not spent more on labor, instead choosing to pursue the less expensive, part-time workers.

As a result, in 2006, Japan’s 11.25 million part-time workers represented 20.5% of the overall workforce. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in 1996 there were 8.7 million part-time workers who accounted for 16.6% of Japan’s workforce.

What’s the point of all this? This morning the Nikkei announced that Recruit, one of Japan’s largest job placement service agencies, will be providing capital to help set up a new firm that will focus on helping retailing firms become more efficient by taking over all aspects of the recruiting process, starting with interviews and going all the way through to training.

There are still more open positions than job seekers, so firms are having trouble finding people, especially for part-time positions. Japan’s retail sector is also hurting very badly, with department store, supermarket and convenience store sales all posting declines last year. How are firms going to make themselves seem appealing enough to fill those empty positions at low cost without offering more money?

More on the HR practices over at Yakuza, Inc.

A few days ago we published a piece on the growing number of part-time Yakuza workers in Japan, and the corresponding decrease in ‘full-time’ gangsters. Jun Okumura of the Global Talk 21 blog has written on a similar topic. He picked up a BBC piece concerning the recent Yakuza turf wars in Tokyo which claimed:

The number of gangsters - known as yakuza - in Japan has grown in the past 10 years to more than 85,000, according to official figures.

Those official figures, of course, would be from Japan’s National Police Agency. Jun has used an NPA report showing Yakuza membership from 1992 to 2006 to demonstrate that the number of mobsters declined quickly after the bursting of the bubble and has been slowly picking up since. Again, this supports our conclusion that the Yakuza have stayed ahead of the curve in relation to Japan’s legitimate business sector.

Okumura, however, is not content to demonstrate that point only. As he puts it later:

But not even that is the whole story. You see, the first chart in the PDF document shows us that the top three yakuza syndicates dominate the industry, accounting for 63,000, or 76.2%, of all yakuza members. Apparently, the lean years has forced consolidation across the entire industry, and produced an oligopoly.

We can only wonder what would have happened if the banking sector had reacted so quickly. It seems about time for someone to publish a Yakuza Way series of management books…

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