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Paper short abstract:

Japanese day labourers used to look for work in street labour markets called yoseba. Now the yoseba are in decline, but day labouring thrives through online recruitment sites. It is far more convenient, but the loss of a physical gathering place destroys any possibility of solidarity among workers.

Paper long abstract:

Day labouring is the most precarious of all the various forms of non-permanent labour. Traditionally they have gathered in street labour day labour markets called yoseba. In the epilogue of my book, Men of Uncertainty (SUNY Press, 2001), I described how the yoseba were gradually losing their function, although the trend in the Japanese economy was moving steadily away from “lifetime employment” and towards various forms of insecure labour. That trend has now continued to the point where insecure labour broadly defined now makes up about 40% of the workforce, while the yoseba have turned into giant low-budget social housing centres, populated mainly by elderly men living on welfare, the bars and gambling dens largely replaced by day care centres and old folks’ clubs. But day labourers have not disappeared from the Japanese labour market. They have deserted the yoseba in favour of online gig economy employment agencies which match workers with employers much like an online dating site. With no real-world gathering place, day labourers have become almost invisible, which may account for the dearth of scholarship on the subject. Legislation in 2012 attempted to outlaw supotto haken (“spot dispatch personnel”, one of the euphemisms for digital day labour), but there are various exceptions, and a range of illegal black-economy operators ensuring that the practice survives. This presentation will discuss the phenomenon of digital day labourers and introduce my recent ethnographic work on them. The digital age has made day labouring more convenient for both employers and workers, but the loss of the physical gathering place has atomized the day labouring population, destroying the possibility of solidarity and organization which used to attract left-wing activists to the yoseba.