2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Non-regular Workers in Japan
Author : Jennifer S. Oh
Published in: Democratic Governance in Northeast Asia: A Human-Centered Approach to Evaluating Democracy
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
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This chapter examines the deficiencies of Japanese democratic governance through the perspective of non-regular workers. In Japan, organized labor unions, the labor policymaking system, and electoral competition serve to secure the rights of regular workers at the expense of non-regular workers. As a result, non-regular workers, who constitute nearly 40 percent of the total employed labor force, are excluded from the very institutions that should represent and empower them. The case of Japanese non-regular workers demonstrates that procedurally stable and strong democracies can systematically disempower and underrepresent a large section of the population.