ABSTRACT
As the transition from school to work in industrialized countries has become longer and more complicated, young people’s condition has become fluid and precarious. In some countries, youth unemployment has increased, as have the number of young people who work in casual jobs or who are categorized as ‘inactive’. Furthermore, more young people are changing their working conditions on a frequent basis; moving between unemployment and temporary jobs or from being inactive to pursuing training and education. These increases have made it difficult to examine young people’s condition using the traditional categories of employed and unemployed. Consequently, new categories, such as ‘NEET’ and ‘freeter’ have emerged. In the UK, the term NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) was intro-
duced in the early 1990s. Changes in UK policy disqualified 16 and 17 year-olds from claiming unemployment-related benefits and therefore the statistical category of ‘unemployment’ for this age group was removed. While the changes promoted increased educational participation and those without work faced pressure to join youth training programmes, there remained a considerable number of young people who were not in education, employment, or training. NEET was introduced as a new category to describe vulnerability and as a target for policy interventions (Furlong 2006). In Japan, the term freeter has been used to refer to young part-time, and temporary
workers (excluding student workers). Originally a slang term combining the words ‘freelance’ and ‘arbeiter’, (Arbeit being the German term for work) it was used to indicate a ‘side job’ (‘McJob’ or ‘fiddly job’ in the British literature). Although students frequently held part-time temporary positions, until the end of the 1980s most young people in Japan made smooth and direct transitions from school or university to relatively stable forms of employment. In the 1990s, transitions became much less stable and the number of freeters increased rapidly. At the end of the 1990s, the Japanese government began estimating the number of freeters, and the results were surprising. One estimate
showed that among 15-34 year-olds, the number increased from 1.01 million in 1992 to 2.09 million in 2002 (MHLW 2004). Another showed an increase from 1.83 million in 1990 to 4.18 million in 2001 (Cabinet Office 2003). The discrepancy between the two estimates is a result of the adoption of different
definitions of freeters. The lower estimate includes non-students working in part-time or temporary jobs, as well as those unemployed and seeking such jobs. The higher estimate includes almost all non-regular employment (including agency work), as well as all of those who are not working but who are seeking any type of employment. With the increase of non-standard forms of employment, increasingly unemployed people hoping for regular work are only able to gain employment as freeters. In the early 2000s, the increase in the number of ‘inactive’ young people began to
attract public attention and attempts were made to estimate the numbers defined as NEET. The Japanese NEET differs from the UK concept: in particular it excludes unemployed young people. As unemployment has increased and the average duration of unemployment lengthened, more unemployed young people have taken a break from job-seeking because of the physical and psychological stress brought about by unemployment. As a consequence, there has been a large increase in the number of young people not actively seeking jobs, but who want to work (Cabinet Office 2005). One fairly reliable estimate shows that the most rapidly increasing segment in the last decade is the ‘potential unemployed’ segment – those who are not currently seeking jobs but who want to work (ibid.).
