Business News - Part-time workers rising in Japan

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Part-time workers rising in Japan

TOKYO (UPI) -- The Japanese government says part-time, temporary and contract workers now make up a record 35.5 percent of Japan's workforce.

Aging baby boom-generation members and housewives comprise the majority of these kinds of "non-regular" workers, whose popularity among employers has soared since Japan's economic bubble period of the 1990's, Kyodo News reported Saturday.

The hiring of part-timers continued to increase even during last year's economic expansion, the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said. It says that of all male workers, 19.9 percent were part-timers or contract workers, while the figure for females was 55.2 percent, both record highs. Those figures stand in stark contrast to 1987, when only 9.1 percent of the male workforce and 37.1 percent of female workers were part-timers.

Kyodo said the government has documented some 19 million non-regular workers in the country's workforce.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International

This news arrived on: 07/05/2008

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