Distinguished Speakers Program 2009: Professor Kazuo Sugeno
31 August 2009
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Towards a New Form of Flexicurity?: Fluctuating Employment System and Labour Law in Japan
Global competition is ravaging the labour markets of industrialised and industrialising economies. Income gaps between high and low income households, and between the top and the bottom group of wage earners, are claimed to be expanding in many economies. Financial globalisation is considered to be a major driving force for such progressing income inequalities. Non-standard workers are increasing significantly as a consequence of enterprise efforts to reduce manpower costs and increase management flexibility to cope with severe global competition. The current deep recession that rapidly spread around the globe as a consequence of the US financial crisis devastated global labour markets. This is indeed a typical example of the globalisation's danger to the state of global labour.
Thus, the common agenda of labor policies across national economies under global competition deals with how to tackle the job catastrophe in the current financial and economic crisis, and how to cope with growing income inequality and the increasing incidence of non-standard employment.
The Japanese economy has undergone similar changes and has come to face similar problems. In this process, philosophies and practices of employment as well as labor policies have fluctuated between mobilisation (flexibility) and stabilisation (security) of the labour market. Yet, the uniqueness of Japanese problems is that, despite significant changes, the long term employment system for regular workers is still persistent, along with the seniority based wage system, while non-standard employment has grown quickly and partially replaced standard employment. The external, non-standard-employee labour market has not yet coalesced with the internal, standard-employee labour market.
Starting with the revision of the Part Time Employment Law in 2007, the government is now searching for methods to regain the balance between job security and management flexibility. In this lecture, the author discusses a new form of flexicurity in the context of the Japanese employment system's current situation.
About the Speaker
Professor Kazuo Sugeno is Professor of Labour Law at the University of Tokyo, and co-author of Japanese Employment and Labor Law among other texts. His lecture will coincide with the International Society for Labour and Social Security Law XIX World Congress.
After finishing legal education in the University of Tokyo in 1966 and judicial training in 1968, went through academic training in the Faculty of Law of University of Tokyo.
His international experiences include, Visiting Scholar of Yale Law School (1974-75), University of Michigan Law School (1975-76) and St. Catherine's and St Anthony's Colleges of Oxford University (1996-97); Visiting Professor of Harvard Law School (1985-6) ; General Reporter on "Flexibility in Working Time" at World Congress of Comparative Law (Montreal, 1990) and on "Discrimination in Employment" at World Congress of International Society for Labour & Social Security Laws (Buenos Aires, 1997); Became President of the same International Society in 2006
Appointed as Chairman of Central Labour Relations Commission in 2006 and selected as Member of the Japan Academy in 2008
This event is part of the Sydney Law School Distinguished Speakers Program 2009. Click here for more details.
Time: 5.30 Registration 6.00-7.30pm Lecture
Location: Sydney Law School, Building F10, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney
Contact: Events Coordinator
Phone: (02) 9351 0248