Why Freeter and NEET are Misunderstood: Recognizing the New Precarious Conditions of Japanese Youth

In developed countries, the transition from school to work has radically changed over the past two decades. It has become prolonged, complicated and individualized (Bynner et al., 1997; Walther et al., 2004). Young people used to transition directly from school to stable employment, or with a very short unemployed period. In many European countries, this situation has been changing since the eighties: overall youth unemployment has increased, and many young people experience long periods of unemployment, government training schemes and part-time or temporary jobs. In Japan, this change has taken a decade later to appear, becoming prevalent by the late nineties (Inui, 2003). The transiting process has become not only precarious for young people, but also difficult for society to precisely understand the risks and problems. Traditionally, we have been able to recognize young people's situation by a simple category: in education, employed, in training or unemployed. However, these categories no longer accurately represent young people's state. In Japan, most young people used to move from school directly to full-time employment through the new graduate recruitment system (Inui, 1993). Therefore, in official statistics such as the School Basic Survey, 'employed' includes only those who are in regular employment, while those who are in part-time or temporary work are covered by the categories 'jobless' and 'others'. However, with the increase in non-full-time jobs in the nineties, these categories have become less useful for describing the actual employment conditions of young people. Indeed, this is why, in the late of nineties, the Japanese Ministry of Education changed the category name from 'jobless' to 'others'.

The Active Subjects of Welfare Reform: a Street-Level Comparison of Employment Services in Australia and Denmark

This paper explores the similarities and differences between Denmark and Australia in adopting welfare reform activation measures in the field of employment services. In Australia and Denmark the discourse of welfare reform centres the 'activation' of citizens through 'mutual obligation' type requirements. Through various forms of case management, unemployed individuals are encouraged to act upon themselves in creating the right set of ethical dispositions congruent with 'active citizenship'. At the same time any resistance to heightened conditionality on the part of the unemployed person is dealt with through a range of coercive and disciplinary techniques. A comparative case study between these two countries allows us to consider how similar ideas, discourse and principles are shaping policy implementation in countries that have very different welfare state trajectories and institutional arrangements for the delivery of social welfare generally and employment services specifically. And in research terms, a comparison between a Nordic welfare state and an Anglo-Saxon welfare state provides an opportunity to critically examine the utility of 'welfare regime' type analyses and the neo-liberal convergence thesis in comparative welfare research. On the basis of empirical analysis, the article concludes that a single focus on abstract typologies or political ideologies is not very helpful in getting the measure of welfare reform (or any other major policy development for that matter). At the 'street-level' of policy practice there is considerably more ambiguity, incoherence and contradiction than is suggested by linear accounts of welfare reform.

Poverty in Israel

The paper deals with poverty within Israel. Against the background of the history of pre-state Israel and the developments after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 the historical roots of Israeli poverty are analyzed. Thus the ‘socialist’-Zionist project, ethnic exclusion, religious and intra-Jewish ethnic lines of conflict as well as the Bedouins, Druzes and Israeli Arabs as ‘specific’ Israeli citizen are discussed. Despite the economic growth in Israel since 2003 ‘the majority of Israeli wage earners (over 60percent) earned less than $1,450 a month last year’ (Goldstein 2007, p. 1). In 2004 1.3 million Israelis lived below the poverty line, a number which in 2005 increased to more than 1.5 million Israelis. In spite of growing economic prosperity the proportion of families belonging to the working-poor, i.e. families with at least one family member in paid employment, increased from 11.4 percent in 2004 to 12.2 percent in 2005. The percentage of poor families in the working population increased from 40.6 percent to 43.1 percent. Nearly 60 percent of the ‘working-poor’ were working fulltime (Sinai 2006a, Shaoul 2006). 42 percent of Israeli Arab families are living below the poverty line. The average wages are less than half the wages of Ashkenazi Jews. Every second Israeli Arab child lives in poverty. When in 1996 to 2001 the unemployment rate of the Jewish Israelis increased by about 53 percent, the unemployment rate of the Arab Israelis increased by 126 percent (cf. Shaoul 2006). 80 percent of Israelis regard themselves as poor. 23 percent of the pensioners are living below the poverty line. Poverty among children increased in 1988 to 2005 by about 50 percent. Approximately one fifth of all under-age children (714.000) in Israel are suffering from hunger (cf. Shaoul 2006). 75 percent of the poor families cannot afford medicine and 70 percent are dependant on food donations (cf. Sinai 2005b). Nearly one third of the Holocaust survivors are living in poverty. Some of the Holocaust survivors get $ 600,- per month from the German government, whilst other Holocaust survivors receive only $ 350,- per month from the Israeli Ministry of Finance and the Holocaust survivors that immigrated to Israel after 1953 (who amount to 70 percent of the Holocaust survivors in Israel) only receive the general national pension. Nearly 20 percent of the Holocaust survivors are at the present time 86 years and older, 70 percent are older than 76 years. (cf. Medina 2007, p. 1) They are not entitled to a supplementary payment or to compensation. But the problematic economic situation of the Holocaust survivors is neither new information nor an unknown fact. As a result of the precarious situation several are in need of the help of welfare organizations, because they cannot afford to some degree their necessary medicine.

The Role of a Non-Governmental Organization in the Improvement of Employment in Finland: A Case Study

This study discusses one Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) as an alternative institution for the improvement of employment in a Finnish city. Empirical data was collected from 16 employees and from an official of the organization using questionnaires, interviews and participant observation. The data was analyzed qualitatively and the findings revealed that, the organization plays complementary role in cooperating with the government to provide social services to underprivileged groups of people, through which the organization is able to create jobs for long-term unemployed people in the city of Jyväskylä. However, the skill development training of the organization was found to be inadequate for boosting the employability of their employees in the open labour market, once the latter’s 1-2 year contract ended. The study concluded that for the organization to become a viable alternative institution for the improvement of employment in the city of Jyväskylä, it must improve the skill development training of their employees, as well as increase collaboration with other actors that are working towards the same goals.

What’s the Problem? Precarious Youth: Marginalisation, Criminalisation and Racialisation.

Since the nineteenth century invention of adolescence, young people have been consistently identified as social problems in western societies. Their contemporary status as a focus of fear and anxiety is, in that sense, nothing new. In this paper, I try to combine this sense of historical recurrence about the youth problem with some questions about what is different about the present – asking what is distinctive about the shape of the youth problem now? This is a difficult balance to strike, and what I have to say will probably lean more towards an emphasis on the historical conditions and routes of the youth problem. That balance reflects my own orientations and knowledge (I am not expert on the contemporary conditions of being young). But it also arises from my belief that much contemporary social science is profoundly forgetful. An enthusiasm for stressing the newness, or novelty, of the present connects many varieties of contemporary scholarship. One result is the construction of what Janet Fink and I have referred to as ‘sociological time’ in which

The Role of a Non-Governmental Organization in the Improvement of Employment in Finland: A Case Study

This study discusses one Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) as an alternative institution for the improvement of employment in a Finnish city. Empirical data was collected from 16 employees and from an official of the organization using questionnaires, interviews and participant observation. The data was analyzed qualitatively and the findings revealed that, the organization plays complementary role in cooperating with the government to provide social services to underprivileged groups of people, through which the organization is able to create jobs for long-term unemployed people in the City of Jyväskylä. However, the skill development training of the organization was found to be inadequate for boosting the employability of their employees in the open labour market, once their 1-2 year contract ended. The study concluded that for the organization to become a viable alternative institution for the improvement of employment in the City of Jyväskylä, it must improve the skill development training of their employees, as well as increase collaboration with other actors that are working towards the same goals.