ABSTRACT
Governments in industrialised countries implemented labour market deregulation under the increasing neoliberal pressure of globalisation, and Japan and Italy were no exceptions to this trend. In response to employers’ demand, the governments in both countries implemented deregulation aimed at flexible use of non-regular employment such as temporary agency work and fixed-term contracts from the 1990s. Labour market deregulation was implemented during the economic stagnation after the collapse of the bubble economy in Japan and under the fiscal constraint of the Maastricht convergence criteria for the European Monetary Union (EMU) in Italy. However, the ways labour market deregulation was introduced in these countries were quite different despite the common neoliberal pressure of globalisation. While Japan introduced quite extensive labour market deregulation with a major exception of the maintenance of rigid dismissal rules, Italy maintained restrictive and worker-protective regulations to a greater extent. This difference resulted in the greater use of non-regular employment and labour market flexibility in Japan than in Italy. The ‘working poor’ has become more visible in Japan after the labour market deregulation in the early 2000s, although this issue has certainly existed in Italy too, where young people have been struggling to find a stable regular job as in Japan.
