This paper will investigate how workers in precarious employment may experience the implementation of "egalitarian" / "progressive" human resource management practices by an individual firm within the broader context of rapid growth of nonstandard work arrangements. Drawing on a case study of a Swedish retailer in Japan, the paper will discuss how "improved conditions" are perceived and experienced by non-regular workers, who otherwise receive lower wages for the same work as regular workers, do not benefit from the same levels of training investment, and do not enjoy the same career development opportunities.
Research from an increasingly varied range of contexts has noted in recent decades that the growth of precarious work defined by "uncertainty, instability and insecurity of work" has involved labour market risks to be passed on to individual workers, as opposed to being borne by employers or the state, with an accompanying constraint on extent of social benefits and statutory entitlements (Kalleberg and Hewison, 2013: 271). Such a trend is also observed across Asian economies including Japan, where Osawa, Kim and Kingson (2013) have noted the rapid and extensive rise of precarious employment beginning in the 1990s, underscoring how the traditionally underprivileged non-regular workers have been disadvantaged even further in this period, especially the young and women. Non-regular job growth has outstripped "standard" job growth in the country, with legislation allowing for unfavourable treatment of part-time and temporary workers (Gottfried, 2014).
While the number of male workers in precarious jobs in Japan has noticeably increased, lower skilled workers and especially women still comprise the largest group holding such jobs. Indeed, the recent increase in precarity in the labour market is not really new in Japan as far as women are concerned. The country’s much-studied national employment system has always been characterised, in addition to more celebrated tenets, by women's low labour force participation, their relegation to peripheral, temporary, and marginal positions in the workforce, and near-absence from managerial posts (Bozkurt, 2012). In fact the heavily gendered dual labour markets may best be seen as central to the core logic of the Japanese employment sytem rather than an unintended consequence (Taylor, 2006). "Active discrimination" (Lam, 1992), exploitation as "a buffer for economic cycles" (Renshaw, 1999: 3), and highly unequal treatment in the workplace have been persistent in women's employment experiences in Japan over decades (Hiroshi, 1982; Toshiko, 1983; Saso, 1990; Brinton, 1993; Graham, 2003; Volkmar and Westbrook, 2005).
In this context of widespread disadvantage for non-regular workers in general and women in particular, we look at an initiative by a Swedish multinational retailer in Japan where the wage and other distinctions between regular and non-regular workers were discarded and all non-managerial workers put on the same contract. Such a break with the dominant practice in the given context is especially noteworthy given the tendency of the retail sector globally to operate on the basis of low-skills, low-pay and high precarity.
While multinational corporations are generally seen as major contributors to processes of precarization globally, extant research has also shown there is substantial variation in firm practices, including at least partially due to a country of origin effect (Ferner, 1997; Ferner and Quantanilla, 1998; Almond, 2011; Harzing and Sorge, 2003). Dickmann observes that where a country of origin effect is "successfully" retained in the HR practices of a MNE the outcome of such transfer may be positive or negative (Dickmann, 2003). Multinationals can also play a critical role by introducing new management practices even where these may not in the first glance be aligned with the institutional and cultural contexts of host countries (Gamble, 2006). The paper draws on this literature, as well as research on precarity, to inquire what happens when a multinational from a country of origin widely recognized as having an egalitarian, worker-friendly employment system, particularly in terms of gender, transfers HR practices to a subsidiary location in what appears to entail a direct improvement of the conditions of employment for the most underprivileged group of workers. The changes launched under a banner of "egalitarian", "progressive" management may be seen as an instance where "some firms develop more socially responsible practices" (Kroon and Paauwe, 2013), but a closer study of this case also promises to reveal the constraints on and limits to the extent to which firm level practices can substantially transform worker experiences of precarity.
The empirical material analyzed comprises of both qualitative and quantitative data. Data on the process of implementation and the responses from store staff in various ranks is derived from 12 in-depth interviews at the multinational's Japan Head Office and two selected stores in the Tokyo region, one a "high performer" and the other a "poor performer", as seen by head office. These were carried out in 2016, a year and a half after the launch of the new system. This data is supplemented by a range of archival data including firm documents and reports from external media outlets. The interview and archival data is further contextualized against quantitative data collected through a survey questionnaire among workers in 2015, six months after the implementation of the change package. The survey data includes information on respondents' general perceptions about the change initiative and the employer's claims to be "egalitarian". The findings and discussion will be elaborated and clarified in time for the conference in March 2018.
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