Freeters

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Description

Andy Robinson:

"A Freeter (“a Japanese expression for people between the age of 15 and 34 who lack full time employment or are unemployed, excluding homemakers and students” – Wikipedia). Although the Japanese have coined a term for the group, they exist all over the world, and are a social force of underestimated and growing importance. The Japanese are unusual in giving it a name. This is the stratum which provides most of the participants in autonomous activism throughout the global North. In Japan, the Freeters General Union is a political body with a broadly autonomist and anti-neoliberal perspective, which organizes initiatives such as Mayday demonstrations and anti-government protests (see http://freeter-union.org/mayday/index-en.html). Many of those participating in similar protests in European countries doubtless come from a similar social position.


Other places have other names. In Africa, the term “youth” is often extended to members of a similar category – young people (especially but not exclusively men) who are too old to be classified as children who are expected to have potential support, but who have not entered into the socially-recognised categories of adulthood by getting a well-paid job. Such a person is caught in a kind of social limbo between social statuses, and appear discursively and socially as perennial agents of revolt – “youths” form the backbone of most protests, the footsoldiers of political parties, the recruits for resistance and opposition movements, etc.


The term "neet" is sometimes used in English, meaning “not in employment or education”; in Blairite-neoliberal rhetoric, “neet” are viewed as a problem. In post-autonomism, "emarginati" has some similar connotations, though it refers mainly to those within the group who have (marginal) work. Similarly, “precariat” and “precarity” have emerged as terms in the discourse in Europe, signifying marginal workers and non-workers as distinct from full-time, well-paid workers.

Whatever its name, this stratum is politically important. It is one of the most common constituencies of radical and insurgent political movements across the spectrum, and its peculiar situation – slipping outside the segmentary linear functioning of identity-narratives of paid work, consumer affluence and (nuclear) family – places it at the forefront of historical transformation. In Iran, there is an entire dissident counterculture emerging from a similarly situated stratum of young people (Zanganeth ed 2006). One might in other circumstances say that this group is the main constituency of the Afghan and Pakistani (neo-)Taleban (Giustozzi 2007) and of Islamism in Egypt (Slackman 2008). In India, pressures reminiscent of the 1968 rebellions are stirring in the cities as the situation of single youths runs up against conservative values (Chakravarthy 2007). In mainstream political science scholarship, a similar stratum – usually identified as educated, un/underemployed, and socially frustrated – has been identified as the agent of autonomous activism in Europe (Clark 1996), of East Asian communist movements (reference misplaced), and of a wide range of ethnic revivalist and nationalist movements (Smith 1979).


The context for the emergence of this group (or groups, if we count the “educated” freeter and the hyper-excluded as distinct) is that the formal economy is declining in scale across the world, leaving more and more people outside of or marginal to it. Unemployment, and casual and marginal employment, are rising pretty much everywhere. Only a small and declining proportion of the world’s population can expect stable jobs and lives. This leaves a large proportion with a very limited stake in the system. Even if attracted to the dominant discourse of success within the system (which is by no means guaranteed), such people typically lack the means to obtain what the system claims to offer. The “educated” freeter specifically, emerges from the intersection of the excluded stratum with modernist discourses of inclusion through education (which often seek to universalize education but not inclusion, or confuse the stratifying effects of formal education with a presumed capacity of education to raise welfare by itself). Many countries have sought, and still seek, to stimulate investment and development by training large numbers of graduates in target areas (for example, engineering in Egypt), a trend which may be exacerbated by “knowledge society” discourse and the use of education and training as a means of managing unemployed people. The dispossessed more broadly emerge from systemic violence such as forced displacement, accumulation-by-dispossession, resource grabbing, war, negative patronage (harming outsiders to please insiders), criminalization and intolerance of difference. The excluded are central protagonists in many social struggles. As the Caffentzis puts it, ‘Once again, as at the dawn of capitalism, the physiognomy of the world proletariat is that of the pauper, the vagabond, the criminal, the panhandler, the refugee sweatshop worker, the mercenary, the rioter’ (1992: 321). This excluded stratum tends towards the network form, but can easily end up pulled into the reactive rather than active kind of network."

Discussion

Charles Hugh Smith:

"What happens to the social fabric of an advanced-economy nation after a decade or more of economic stagnation?

For an answer, we can turn to Japan. The second-largest economy in the world has stagnated in just this fashion for almost twenty years, and the consequences for the “lost generations” which have come of age in the “lost decades” have been dire. In many ways, the social conventions of Japan are fraying or unraveling under the relentless pressure of an economy in seemingly permanent decline.

While the world sees Japan as the home of consumer technology juggernauts such as Sony and Toshiba and high-tech “bullet trains” (shinkansen), beneath the bright lights of Tokyo and the evident wealth generated by decades of hard work and the massive global export machine of “Japan, Inc,” lies a different reality: increasing poverty and decreasing opportunity for the nation’s youth.

The gap between extremes of income at the top and bottom of society—measured by the Gini coefficient—has been growing in Japan for years; to the surprise of many outsiders, once-egalitarian Japan is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.

The media in Japan have popularized the phrase “kakusa shakai,” literally meaning “gap society.” As the elite slice of society prospers and younger workers are increasingly marginalized, the media has focused on the shrinking middle class. For example, a bestselling book offers tips on how to get by on an annual income of less than three million yen ($30,770). Two million yen ($20,500) has become the de-facto poverty line for millions of Japanese, especially outside high-cost Tokyo.

More than one-third of the workforce is part-time as companies have shed the famed Japanese lifetime employment system, nudged along by government legislation which abolished restrictions on flexible hiring a few years ago. Temp agencies have expanded to fill the need for contract jobs, as permanent job opportunities have dwindled.

Many fear that as the generation of salaried Baby Boomers dies out, the country’s economic slide might accelerate. Japan’s share of the global economy has fallen below 10 percent from a peak of 18 percent in 1994. Were this decline to continue, income disparities would widen and threaten to pull this once-stable society apart.

Young Japanese, their expectations permanently downsized, are increasingly opting out of the rigid social systems on which Japan, Inc. was built.

The term “Freeter” is a hybrid word that originated in the late 1980s, just as the Japanese property and stock market bubbles reached their zenith. It combines the English “free” and the German “arbeiter,” or worker, and describes a lifestyle which is radically different from the buttoned-down rigidity of the permanent-employment economy: freedom to move between jobs.

This absence of loyalty to a company is totally alien to previous generations of driven Japanese “salarymen” who were expected to uncomplainingly turn in 70-hour work weeks at the same company for decades, all in exchange for lifetime employment.

Many young people have come to mistrust big corporations, having seen their fathers or uncles eased out of “lifetime” jobs in the relentless downsizing of the past twenty years. From the point of view of the younger generations, the loyalty their parents unstintingly offered to companies was wasted.

They have also come to see diminishing value in the grueling study and tortuous examinations required to compete for the elite jobs in academia, industry and government; with opportunities fading, long years of study are perceived as pointless.

In contrast, the “freeter” lifestyle is one of hopping between short-term jobs and devoting energy and time to foreign travel, hobbies or other interests.

As long ago as 2001, The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare estimates that 50 percent of high school graduates and 30 percent of college graduates now quit their jobs within three years of leaving school.

The downside is permanently downsized income and prospects. Many of the four million “freeters” survive on part-time work and either live at home or in a tiny flat with no bath. A typical “freeter” wage is 1,000 yen ($10.25) an hour.

Japan’s slump has lasted so long, that a “New Lost Generation” is coming of age, joining Japan’s first “Lost Generation” which graduated into the bleak job market of the 1990s.

These trends have led to an ironic moniker for the Freeter lifestyle: Dame-Ren (No Good People). The Dame-Ren get by on odd jobs, low-cost living and drastically diminished expectations.

The decline of permanent employment has led to the unraveling of social mores and conventions. Many young men now reject the macho work ethic and related values of their fathers. These “herbivores” also reject the traditional Samurai ideal of masculinity.

Derisively called “herbivores” or “grass-eaters,” these young men are uncompetitive and uncommitted to work, evidence of their deep disillusionment with Japan’s troubled economy.

A bestselling book titled The Herbivorous Ladylike Men Who Are Changing Japan by Megumi Ushikubo, president of Tokyo marketing firm Infinity, claims that about two-thirds of all Japanese men aged 20-34 are now partial or total grass-eaters. “People who grew up in the bubble era (of the 1980s) really feel like they were let down. They worked so hard and it all came to nothing,” says Ms Ushikubo. “So the men who came after them have changed.”

This has spawned a disconnect between genders so pervasive that Japan is experiencing a “social recession” in marriage, births, and even sex, all of which are declining.

With a wealth and income divide widening along generational lines, many young Japanese are attaching themselves to their parents, the generation that accumulated home and savings during the boom years of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Surveys indicate that roughly two-thirds of freeters live at home.

Freeters “who have no children, no dreams, hope or job skills could become a major burden on society, as they contribute to the decline in the birthrate and in social insurance contributions,” Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor wrote in a magazine essay titled, Parasite Singles Feed on Family System." (http://dangerousminds.net/comments/want_to_see_whats_ahead_for_americas_young_pay_attention_to_whats_already_h)

More Information

BIBLIOGRAPHY:


  • Caffentzis, in Midnight Notes Collective: (1992) Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973:1992.
  • Clark, M (1996), Modern Italy, 1971-1995, Longman.
  • Giustozzi, A. (2007) Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan 2002-2007, Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
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