1. Featuring Policies on Precarious Work in Asia
▍ Hsin-huang Michael Hsiao, Arne L. Kalleberg, and Kevin Hewison
Precarious work has become more prevalent in Asia in recent years, as it has for the most part in the rest of the world. By "precarious work" we mean work that is insecure and uncertain and in which workers bear the most risks and receive limited social benefits and protection. The expansion of precarious work in the industrialized countries of East Asia (such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) reflects a departure from the more stable and permanent work patterns that marked their transition to "modern" industrial societies. In the countries of South and Southeast Asia (such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka), work in the "modern" sector has long been precarious because of the growth of the informal economy in these countries as workers have moved out of the pervasive agricultural sector. Unstable and insecure employment practices have also spread to the formal industrial and service sectors in these countries.
Precarious work has negative consequences for the nature of work, workplaces, and people's work experiences. It is also a social, economic, and political concern in that it affects people's ability to raise families and manage their everyday lives. The costs of precarious work, in terms of limited welfare, poor housing, and economic insecurity, are farreaching and cut across many salient topics in the social sciences. Precarious work has an impact on workers and their families, governments, and businesses. Concerns associated with the spread of precarious work in Asia have provoked a range of responses from workers and governments. While market reforms and the growth of precarious work have decreased the power of organized labor and workers to campaign for progressive social policies, there are signs in some Asian countries of growing worker and trade union resistance to the spread of precarious work and economic inequality.
The growth of precarious work has thus become an increasingly urgent issue, and governments in Asia (and the rest of the world) are coming under pressure to "do something" to reduce social and economic distress. Existing welfare regimes based on a model of relatively stable work are no longer adequate now that precariousness is the dominant feature of employment relations. Governments have been pressed to extend social protection to help people who do not have stable work to manage the new risk structures and to revise existing labor laws and enact new ones that may help regulate precarious work.
These responses to precarious work underscore the political nature of economic restructuring and social welfare. The character of the political response depends on the social, political, and economic context: in many European countries, for example, it is often assumed that the state will manage the social impact of precarious work, while in many East and Southeast Asian countries, the elites may want to calm social unrest generated by capitalism's competitive transformation and maintain order in society through electoral populism or social welfare expansion.
The chapters in this book provide an overview of the rise of precarious work and the political and policy responses to it in a variety of Asian countries, both in East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China), Southeast Asia (Indonesia and the ASEAN countries in general), and South Asia (Sri Lanka). Each chapter places the growth of precarious work within the social, economic, and political context of the country or countries in question and provides a wealth of information on trends in precarious work and their consequences. In this introduction, we provide a brief synopsis of each of the chapters and highlight some of the general themes that emerge.
Chapter 2, "Confronting Precarious Work in Asia: Politics and Policies," by Arne L. Kalleberg and Kevin Hewison, continues the overview by outlining the reasons for the growth of precarious work in the countries of East, South, and Southeast Asia in recent years. It then Featuring Policies on Precarious Work in Asia 3 reviews some of the social movements and the actions taken by unions and other organizations that have put pressure on governments to adapt their social welfare policies and labor market regulations so as to provide greater social protection from the consequences of precarious work. The chapter concludes with descriptions of some of the policies that these countries have adopted in an effort to maintain "flexibility" for employers while at the same time providing individuals with "economic security," retraining and preparing workers for good jobs, and devising laws and regulations to protect workers in non-regular employment.
I. Polices on Precarious Work in East Asia
The decades immediately after World War II saw the emergence of a normative conception of work that emphasized fairly stable employment at least for workers in core industrial sectors. This "standard employment relationship" (SER) was mainly limited to male workers and provided the basis of the labor laws and social protections associated with the "developmental" state and "productivist" welfare system represented by Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In China, the "iron rice bowl," like the SER, guaranteed workers in state-owned and collectively owned enterprises a measure of predictability in work and welfare.
Changes in each of these countries in the last several decades—such as the rise of globalization and a recent slowdown in economic growth—led to a dismantling of the SER and China's iron rice bowl provisions and to the rise of more precarious forms of work involving non-regular or nonstandard employment relations. These economic and political changes were exacerbated by the Asian economic crisis of the mid-1990s, which helped to accelerate the deregulation of labor markets and the decline in union power, and generally shifted power from labor to capital. In China, the rise of precarious work can be traced to the economic reforms of the mid-1980s, which led to the dismantling of the iron rice bowl and the creation of a market economy.
The four chapters in the section on East Asia describe the dynamics that led to the rise of precarious work in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China and the reactions this provoked from unions and governments. The general patterns were in many ways similar in all of these countries, though their unique historical trajectories resulted in distinct developments.
"Policy Responses to the Precarity of Non-regular Employment in Japan," by Jun Imai, provides an overview of the rise of non-regular work in Japan and the responses to it. Today,“non-regular”workers account for about 36 percent of the total workforce in Japan. They are now more likely to be young people and or men who are excluded from the livelihood security system; this is a change from the past when nonregular workers were mainly middle-aged housewives. These women were not socially excluded as they were working to supplement the income of households in which the main breadwinner was likely to be in regular employment. Imai underlines the importance of gendered, cultural, and ideological factors, such as notions of justice and fairness, in addressing issues related to the division of labor and the rise of precarious work. For example, where it was once felt that non-regular work was not suitable for men—given the dominance of the male breadwinner-female homemaker model—this attitude has changed in recent decades.
In the early 2000s, increasing inequality and social exclusion gradually became an issue in Japan. New types of labor union movements were created that targeted non-regular workers and the media highlighted the plight of those excluded from the livelihood security system. On the policy side, efforts were made, especially in the late-2000s, to re-regulate employment relations through, for example, revision of the Part-time Work Law and the Temporary Dispatching Work Law and the creation of official study groups that tried to deal with the idea of equal treatment for workers in these categories of employment. These efforts led to the adoption of a principle of equal treatment for regular and non-regular workers. However, the equation of fairness and justice with the idea of company citizenship led to equal treatment only in cases where regular and non-regular workers did the same work; otherwise, it did no more than formalize and legitimize the differences between these two kinds of workers. Imai shows that the actions of the state, firms, and labor in dealing with concerns over nonregular work are still constrained by the idea of“company citizenship”as the hallmark of fairness and justice, and he argues that it will be necessary to come up with an alternative logic to company citizenship in order to break down this cultural/ideological rigidity.
Kwang-Yeong Shin's chapter,“Labor Market Flexibility and Policy Issues of Non-regular Employment in South Korea,”discusses the political debates and policies that led to protests and struggles by non-regular workers in South Korea. The issue of non-regular work became prominent in South Korea after the financial crisis of 1997. One result of this crisis was a transformation of labor policies and the politics of crisis management, which reduced the power of both business and labor and enabled the government—under pressure from the IMF—to enact labor market reforms, including deregulation, that would reduce labor costs at the company level and enhance labor market flexibility at the national level. The economic crisis also led to the establishment of a tripartite committee comprising representatives from the government, business, and labor to oversee labor market reforms. In the 2000s, the organized labor unions withdrew from this committee and their influence declined in comparison to that in the 1980s and 1990s. Nonregular workers, who now comprised one-third of all employees in South Korea, were excluded from decision-making processes by the state, business, and organized labor, and they responded with a series of individual and collective protests (in the form of strikes) against discrimination and the neoliberal reforms. These protests were directed toward companies, the government, and even the organized unions. While these protests had some influence on the political discourse, the government's policy responses have failed to reduce the social, economic, and political exclusion of non-regular workers.
This chapter raises the question of what kind of democracy is necessary for protecting the rights of non-regular workers. Shin shows that policies toward these workers and the labor market were much the same under both democratic governments (1998-2008) and more authoritarian, conservative governments (2008-present) in South Korea; in both cases, non-regular work has been associated with low wages and inadequate social protection. He underscores the need to take into account the quality of democracy and the inclusion of non-regular workers when creating labor market policies to address issues of precarious work.
In the chapter entitled“Assessing Reform of the Policies on Nonstandard Workers in Taiwan,”Peter Jen-Der Lue, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, and Chien-Hung Lee discuss policies adopted since 2000 to address the problem of the working poor caused by an increase in nonstandard employment in Taiwan. Nonstandard employment has become more prevalent since 2000 due to intensified globalization and deindustrialization, and the increasing outflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) to China. The authors argue that policy responses to the growth of precarious work have gone through three main phases: a passive regulation phase (1994-1999) during which the emphasis was on providing unemployment insurance but little attention was paid to active labor market policies; a facilitative development phase (1999-2008) during which the expansion of nonstandard work was encouraged in order to enhance labor market flexibility; and a re-regulation phase (2008-present) when (ineffective) efforts were made to protect nonstandard workers' rights and benefits.
In Taiwan, there is little consensus between employer organizations and labor unions, and this has hampered the enactment and implementation of laws regulating agency ("dispatched") workers. Policy making has been piecemeal and incremental. For example, policies to enhance flexibility have been decoupled from those designed to increase security, which contrasts with the more systematic and integrated nature of European models of "flexicurity." Legislation has focused mainly on increasing internal numerical flexibility (such as the introduction of flexible working hours, the institutionalization of parttime work, and easing of limitations on fixed-term employment) rather than on the regulation of dispatched workers. Policies have been aimed at adapting to the changing demands from employers for deregulation in order to respond to the competitive challenges of globalization. Less emphasis has been placed on security, as the Taiwanese state does not hold itself responsible for the outcomes of the market; rather, the state acts as an enabler that facilitates the capacity of all citizens to compete in the market through access to education and health insurance schemes.No specifically pro-labor welfare policy was ever launched as the labor movement was too weak.
The case of China, which is discussed in "Regulating Precarious Labor for Economic Growth and Social Stability in China" by Feng Xu, is different from those of the other three East Asian countries. The Chinese labor market is a fairly recent creation that came into being in the mid-1980s when the government introduced labor contracts to replace the "iron rice bowl" employment system in state-owned and collectively owned enterprises. Like the SER, this system of lifetime employment and social protection was only enjoyed by the minority of residents with urban hukou; unlike the SER, the iron rice bowl was not a social and economic compromise between labor and capital. The Chinese government's labor market initiatives from the mid-1980s led to a rapid rise in unprotected, flexible, and informal employment and a decline in workplace-based social provisions. Prominent in the rise of non-regular work was the growth of labor dispatch (temporary staffing) companies.
The growth of precarious work provoked protests by workers calling for higher wages and better working conditions, and these protests threatened the maintenance of harmonious labor relations, an essential feature of the Chinese government's "harmonious society." In response to these protests, the government introduced the Labor Contract Law (LCL) in 2007 that provided a variety of protections for labor, many of which were based on the enactment of labor contracts between employers and various categories of workers. This law had the effect of increasing the segmentation of the workforce, many members of which (such as self-employed care workers and undocumented, usually migrant, workers) did not have any protection at all. Moreover, capitalists opposed the LCL and sought to get around its key provisions by means of such practices as outsourcing. This shows that in the absence of independent unions, as is the case in China, labor laws will be poorly enforced. This underscores the need for organized labor as a countervailing force to the exploitative power of capital.
