“Japanese Mothers Are New Workforce for Temporary ... - BusinessWeek” plus 1 more

Japanese Mothers Are New Workforce for Temporary ... - BusinessWeek

Posted: 15 Apr 2010 06:13 PM PDT

April 15, 2010, 9:14 PM EDT

By Chana Schoenberger

April 16 (Bloomberg) -- Japanese women returning to work after having children are increasingly seeking jobs through Temp Holdings Co., which is training them for posts at call centers, offices and retirement homes, President Yoshiko Shinohara said.

Japan's second-largest staffing company by sales is counting on women seeking part-time jobs to help it rebound from an expected 39 percent decline in profit for the year to March 31, from a year earlier. Temp Holdings expects to make a 2.5 billion-yen ($26.8 million) profit on sales of 224.5 billion yen.

Analysts forecast the same profit on sales of 223.3 billion yen, according to the median estimate from a Bloomberg survey of five analysts. Last fiscal year, Temp reported 4.1 billion yen of profit on 245.1 billion yen in revenue. The company reports earnings May 11.

"We want to encourage more women to have babies and then work," Shinohara, 75, said in an April 14 interview at her Tokyo office. "Japan had a system that encouraged Japanese women to stay home. This is gradually changing."

The company is targeting returning workers by staffing day- care centers and training jobseekers to be office clerks, sales representatives and health-care workers, Shinohara said.

Temp also plans to sign more contracts to manage companies' call and data centers, she said.

Temp's shares rose 1.8 percent to close at 812 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange yesterday. The Topix index finished 0.8 percent higher.

Shrinking Population

Demand for home health-care aides and nursing-home workers is growing as Japan's population ages. Almost 23 percent of the nation's 127 million people are older than 65, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

"We are also focusing on businesses for the elderly, taking care of them," Shinohara said. "We introduced jobs with flexible hours, such as from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., for mothers."

The industry leader is privately held Staff Service Holdings Co. of Tokyo. Its revenue last year was 334 billion yen.

Japan's economy shrank 5.2 percent in 2009, the steepest contraction in the postwar era. The country's struggle with deflation has constrained growth during the past two decades.

The economy contracted to 474.2 trillion yen in 2009, the lowest level since 1991, without accounting for price changes, and China is set to overtake Japan as the world's second-largest economy this year. The International Monetary Fund in January forecast growth of 1.7 percent this year.

Declining Population

The country's population is also declining and the government is encouraging women to have more children.

The ruling Democratic Party of Japan last month passed a budget that includes a monthly allowance of 13,000 yen per child, starting in June. The government also plans to make public high schools tuition-free.

Japanese women often want to bring home their own paycheck, said Hiromi Hakama, who is 46 and married with a 14-year-old son. Hakama works 22 hours a week as a concierge in a Tokyo apartment building, the third job she's held since her son was 10 months old.

Having a job makes Hakama feel more independent. "It's my own money," she said.

Temp's model takes advantage of the growing move toward temporary employment in Japan during the last decade.

The government relaxed labor rules in place since strikes convulsed Japanese industry in the 1940s and 1950s, so companies are converting full-time positions to part-time jobs that are easier to terminate, said Toru Shinoda, a professor of social sciences at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Temporary jobs often are criticized for lacking job security.

"We are very concerned about temporary worker numbers increasing," said Shinoda, who studied a tent village that sprung up briefly in 2008 when people who lost their contract jobs and homes camped out in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo.

Part-Time Workers

One-third of Japan's workers have part-time, contract or freelance jobs, said Takuji Aida, senior Japan economist at UBS Securities Japan Ltd. They include mothers working part-time while raising children, young people who can't find better jobs and retirees needing money. Temp hires all of these.

"Many people want to get full-time jobs but, of course, economic growth is small, so companies still want part-time workers more," he said.

The global recession prompted Temp to move branches into smaller offices, cut its hiring of new graduates by 80 percent and reduce its advertising budget, Shinohara said.

Shinohara, a high-school graduate with no college degree, founded the company 35 years ago, after a secretarial stint in Sydney introduced her to the concept of temporary workers. She returned to Japan and started the country's first temporary- staffing agency, Tempstaff.

Temp Holdings was formed from the 2008 merger of Tempstaff and People Staff, based in Aichi prefecture west of Tokyo. The combined company has offices in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia and the U.S.

Shinohara is the largest shareholder of the company, with her 36 percent stake valued at about $204 million at yesterday's closing price.

--With assistance from Takako Iwatani in Tokyo. Editors: Michael Tighe, Aaron Sheldrick.

To contact the reporter on this story: Chana Schoenberger in Tokyo at cschoenberg@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net.

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Postal Service prodded -- once again -- to do more with ... - GovExec.com

Posted: 15 Apr 2010 03:14 PM PDT

Staffing levels at the Postal Service took center stage at a House hearing on the struggling agency's finances on Thursday, as lawmakers prodded USPS to strike a balance between streamlining its workforce while ensuring employees' jobs are substantive and stable.

"You have to find people meaningful work, or no matter how compassionate you are, you're not doing them any favors," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, criticizing holding rooms where underemployed postal workers wait until there are tasks for them to perform. "How many billions of dollars would have been saved if you'd aggressively right-sized the force before you came to us and said you want to go from six days [of mail delivery] to five?"

From fiscal years 2007 to 2009, the agency slashed 84,000 full- and part-time jobs, and USPS' proposal to move from six days of mail delivery to five would cut an additional 40,000 full-time positions.

Postmaster General John Potter acknowledged "as the volume has declined, we no longer have eight-hour jobs in all locations," but he said the move toward shorter days was not driven by a preference for part-time workers, but rather by changes in work processes such as automated mail sorting. Potter also noted employees still could build careers at the Postal Service by working fewer hours.

Potter said he hoped negotiations with the agency's unions this year would win him the flexibility to reduce the workforce where necessary, and to move to part-time jobs and create more elastic positions that allow employees to perform multiple functions. The Postal Service, backed by the Government Accountability Office, is asking Congress to pass legislation that would require an arbitrator to take the USPS' financial situation into account when making decisions affecting labor and management.

Issa told Potter during his opening statement that the Postal Service has "more or less a third more people than you need," but he said it "is not really acceptable" to convert full-time jobs to part-time positions, unless applicants are looking specifically for part-time work or part-time positions that lead to full-time work. Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif., said she was concerned that part-time workers might not be treated fairly or could be excluded from collective bargaining agreements. She said she hoped part-time employees still would be able to earn good benefits, and Potter confirmed that if they planned to work for the Postal Service long-term that was possible.

Issa and other committee Republicans said they were skeptical of rapid growth in federal employment, generally. But Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform federal workforce panel, suggested agencies seeking employees might be encouraged to hire postal workers, simultaneously meeting their own staffing needs and reducing the size of the USPS workforce. Issa suggested that postal workers could carry out much of the 2010 census work.

Chaffetz said he would seek authority for the Postal Service to begin a process similar to the Base Realignment and Closure assessments to help determine which post offices should be shuttered.

Lawmakers insisted repeatedly that even as the Postal Service confronts harsh financial realities, the agency must taken into consideration the jobs of postal workers.

"I'm hopeful this committee will find a way to deal with it that preserves the good faith that the people who serve the U.S. Postal Service have a right to expect," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio.

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