The industrial structure　is currently entering a transitional phase all over the world, often known as “the fourth industrial revolution.” Transformation of the industrial structure inevitably brings about changes in employment structure and employment forms, and our work styles are sure to be altered significantly. Not only developed countries in Europe and North America but also Asian nations, which have been late bloomers in terms of industrialization thus far, are now experiencing this fundamental shift simultaneously. The story of economic development in Japan, which went through the first industrial revolution in the late 19^th century some 100 years after Great Britain but was among the leading group during the second and third revolutions, is surely one of great interest to the other nations of Asia.

First, let us look at the broader global context. Around the 1760s in Britain, long centuries of a primarily agricultural economy drew to a close, and the first industrial revolution took off. Factories primarily powered by steam prevailed, and countless farmers left their ancestral lands and became wage earners. At the time the dominant form of employment was an “internal contract system,” a form of indirect management in which workers labored under the bosses contracted by the factory owners. There were scarcely any labor laws except for a few protections for women and children, which were patchy at best. This first industrial revolution spread to Belgium, France, and the United States in the 1830s, Germany in the 1850s, Japan in the 1870s, and Russia in the 1890s. In Asia, Japan led the way in industrialization, but by this time the second industrial revolution was already approaching.

In the early years of the 20^th century, Germany and the US spearheaded the second industrial revolution: heavy and chemical industries, primarily powered by electricity. Among the centerpieces of this revolution was the US-led automobile industry. Factory workers’ employment system changed from an indirect to a direct management system, and companies began to manage workers’ activity directly with a method such as scientific management. It was during this era that labor laws and regulations came to cover all employees, including adult males. In countries that were already industrialized, this second revolution spread like wildfire, and in the second half of the 20^th century after World War II, there was rapid economic development and a major rise in living standards　in developed nations. During this same period, industrialization took off in the nations of Asia, one after another: South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore succeeded in developing export-based industrial economies in the 1960s, followed by Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand, while the full-fledged industrialization of China took place during the 1980s. By this time the third industrial revolution was underway.

The third industrial revolution began in the 1970s and progressed concurrently in Japan,　North America and Europe. Ever more advanced computers were applied in factories and offices, and microelectronics and office automation progressed. While employment forms remained largely unchanged, with direct management the dominant model, there was an increasing emphasis on flexibility in the labor market and work organizations, and in the 1980s much global attention was paid to the Japanese model, characterized by internal flexibility. After that, however, the US led the way in popularizing a business model based on information and communications technology, and the trend was toward pursuit of external flexibility. As industrial revolutions have come with increasing frequency, later-developing countries have not followed in the footsteps of the most advanced countries, but rather have gone from being agricultural societies through the first, second, and third revolutions simultaneously, a process that had taken more than 200 years in the most advanced countries. In Asia today, traditional crafts and state-of-the-art technologies, and traditional and innovative employment forms, exist side by side.

And today, we are witnessing the early years of the fourth industrial revolution, involving technological advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printers, the Internet of Things, and big data. There are wide-ranging discussions and debates on how these technologies are transforming society. With regard to ways of working in particular, opinions vary widely as to the potential disappearance of many kinds of jobs and fundamental shifts in employment forms, and the future remains unclear. However, one thing that remains unchanged is the principle that in later-developing countries, industrial revolutions do not occur in sequence but concurrently. This seminar’s participants are from countries ranging from Japan, where industrialization began in the late 19th century, to Myanmar, where full-scale industrialization began in the 2010s, but all of these countries are united in facing the fourth industrial revolution and the range of issues it presents.

At this point in time, it seems meaningful for all the countries of Asia to look back on how Japanese society has experienced each industrial revolution over the past 150 years, and what sorts of policies have been adopted. In this keynote speech, I will give an overview of the development of Japanese labor policy since industrialization began, focusing primarily on employment forms.

In 1854, a fleet of American warships pressured Japan into opening its ports to trade, ending centuries of seclusion. In 1867, the shogunate that had ruled for centuries was abolished, and Japan began developing as a modern nation. This was known as the Meiji Restoration, because power was restored from the shoguns to the Emperor. The new Meiji government made industrialization a top priority, introducing modern technologies from Europe and the United States, establishing many state-owned factories and then privatizing them. The resulting economic growth also expanded existing traditional industries.

During this era, Japan’s primary industry was textiles, particularly products such as raw silk manufactured for export. The industrial workforce was predominantly female, especially consisting of young unmarried women. Most of these young women came from farming families, and went from lives of rural poverty to being migrant workers. It is valid to say that the international competitiveness of Japan’s textile industry was borne on the backs of these poorly paid workers. Two social problems emerged from this business model. One was rampant exploitation, as naive rural people were deceived by sweet-talking brokers and sent their daughters off to work in factories under wretched conditions. The other problem was these working conditions themselves, with women working 14 to 16-hour days and living in unsanitary dormitories where they frequently fell prey to tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. To address these issues, in 1911 the Japanese government enacted the Factory Act, which regulated commercial employment placement businesses and labor recruiting brokers. It also limited working hours for women and children to 12 hours per day, and prohibited late-night work. However, its scope of enforcement was limited.

World War I, lasting from 1914 to 1918, left deep scars on the European nations where it took place, but in Japan it brought economic benefits, and the second industrial revolution progressed with major expansion of power generation industry and heavy and chemical industries. Hegemonic financial conglomerates known as zaibatsu, including Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo, did away with the prevalent indirect management system of internal contracts, and instead recruited new graduates of the country’s pre-war “higher elementary schools” (the equivalent of today’s junior high schools, from which students graduated at age 14). The employees were trained in-house and expected to work for their entire careers until the mandatory retirement age, with their wages increasing over time. This was the template for the traditional Japanese “lifetime employment system.” Within these companies there were labor-management consultation bodies known as “factory committees,” which enabled communication between the management and workers, but which were primarily intended to prevent interference by external labor unions.

However, this system only applied to permanent employees known as honko, and not to rinji-ko, a new breed of non-permanent employee that had arisen. The latter did the same types of jobs as honko, but their wages were low and their employment insecure. In the 1930s this became a massive social problem, and there was a labor dispute at the Mitsubishi Aircraft Nagoya factory in 1933 that resulted in government intervention. The Ministry of the Interior’s Department of Social Affairs issued an notification that rinji-ko should receive severance pay upon termination.

However, regardless of their forms of employment, those engaged in such modern industries were only a small part of the Japanese labor market at the time. In the early 1930s, only 12% of workers were in the modern industrial sector, while 42% were in traditional industries and 46% in agriculture. While there was an exodus from rural villages to cities, many of those who left ended up in the informal sector, working at small businesses, as day laborers, or doing piecework at home. There was a widening disparity between these workers and those in the modern industrial sector, and a “dual structure” of massive companies on the one hand and tiny businesses and individuals on the other characterizes the Japanese economy to this day.

In the 1930s Japan went to war with China, and as this escalated, Japan became a military state that governed all economic activity including finance, industry, employment and wages. In terms of labor, the government mandated hiring, firing, retirement, wages, and length-of-service-based systems, and within each company were established branches of the Sangyo Hokoku-kai (Patriotic Industrial Association), a framework for various discussions including labor-management relations. Military demand was given top priority, and civilian sectors were converted to meet this demand. In 1941 the war with the US and Britain began, and adult men were sent off to fight, resulting in the mobilization of women and students as workforce. However, Japan was defeated on all fronts and heavily bombarded, unconditionally surrendering in 1945.

Many of Japan’s cities were reduced to ruins by air raids, many aspects of life and economic activity ground to a halt, and around 10 million demobilized soldiers and repatriated nationals returned to the country from overseas. Among the government’s postwar reconstruction measures were public works projects that put the unemployed to work. These projects were implemented　as the unemployment countermeasures works from 1949.

Japan was under US military occupation, and underwent dissolution of the zaibatsu (financial conglomerates), farmland reform, and democratization of labor. As a part of labor democratization, the Labor Union Act was enacted in 1945, and workers were encouraged to organize. Labor unions, which had been dissolved during the war, rapidly re-established and by 1949 the unionization rate had risen to 55.8%. However, these labor unions were almost entirely organized within individual companies or　business establishments, rather than by industry, as is common in Western countries. The rapid development of labor unions within individual companies can be viewed as an extension of the Patriotic Industrial Association, in which each company was compelled by the state to participate under the wartime regime, and the postwar company-based labor unions consisted of these same groups, but with management removed, leaving only employees. These postwar labor unions conducted collective bargaining with management in an effort to raise wages, but the outcome was a wage structure based on a presumption of long-term employment at the same company, closely resembling the wage controls that the state forced companies to adopt during the war. In short, it was a virtually socialist system in which wage levels were divorced from the content of work, and were largely based on age and number of dependent family members. This was the template for the postwar wage structure in Japan.

In the late 1940s, immediately after the war, and the early 1950s, there were frequent labor disputes at major private-sector companies, but after the Japan Productivity Center, in which both labor and management participated, was established in 1955, the trend at private-sector companies moved toward relatively harmonious labor-management negotiations. In the public sector, a labor movement with a confrontational stance toward management lasted until 1975, but after failing to mobilize public support for suto-ken suto (“striking for the right to strike”), public-sector labor also shifted toward a harmonious model.

The approximately 20 years from the mid-1950s until the oil crisis of the mid-1970s were an era of economic growth worldwide, but Japan in particular showed dramatic development, with average annual growth rates topping 10%. Most of the technologies applied to industry during this period were developed in Europe and the US before and during World War II, but after introducing these technologies Japanese companies made improvements that enabled manufacture and export of inexpensive, high-quality products, becoming internationally competitive in the motor vehicle and appliance fields.

With rapid economic growth, the massive unemployment plaguing the labor market was reversed, and there were not enough workers to go around. Adjustment of supply and demand in the labor force mainly revolved around the placement of new junior high school graduates at factories and so forth in urban areas by a national employment security agency, resulting in a large-scale labor migration from rural areas to cities. Farmers themselves also moved from rural communities to cities of their own accord, as migrant workers at factories or on construction sites, but there were many negative aspects to this phenomenon. To address this, factories were established in rural areas and many residents switched from farming to working in factories. The agricultural sector shrank drastically, and Japan became an industrial country on a par with the West. However, the dual economic structure described above (large, modern corporations on the one hand and small businesses and cottage industries on the other) re-emerged and became a significant policy issue.

The Labor Standards Act went into effect soon after the war in 1947, and working hours were limited to eight hours per day, 48 hours per week for all workers including adult males. However, agreements between labor and management resulted in the potential for unlimited overtime work, a situation that continues to this day. The same law also established a basis for minimum wage standards, but a minimum wage was not actually set for a long time due to strong resistance from employers of small businesses. This was because these small businesses were competing in the product market with even smaller cottage industry operators, and if only the former were subject to minimum wage regulations, labor costs would rise and put them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the latter, who were not subject to regulations as they were not officially employing anyone. For this reason, when the Minimum Wage Act was finally enacted in 1959, provisions were made for a minimum wage for homeworkers in cottage-industry as well. Also, there were cases of fatal benzene poisoning among these homeworkers and their poor working conditions became a social issue, leading to passage of the Industrial Home Work Act in 1970. This was a pioneering step in terms of labor policies governing self-employment forms. However, it applied only to industrial home-based work, and does not apply to the many home-based workers utilizing information and communications technology today.

Although the term “dual economic structure” often referred, in this era, to the disparity between large enterprises and small enterprises or cottage industries, there was also a significant disparity between permanent workers (honko) and non-permanent workers (rinji-ko) or outsourced workers (shagai-ko). The latter two earned low wages and their employment was not secure. In the 1950s there was controversy over whether labor agreements negotiated by honko labor unions, which set high standards for working conditions, should also apply to rinji-ko, but the courts decided against this. However, from the 1960s onward the number of rinji-ko rapidly dwindled due to high economic growth, and in their place, married female part-time workers became the mainstay of the low-wage-earning, insecurely employed non-permanent workforce. This occurred in the context of the rapid spread of household appliances, which drastically reduced the amount of time spent on housework and made it easier for women to work part-time in factories or shops to supplement the family income, rather than doing piecework at home. As they regarded housework as their primary occupation and their jobs as secondary, their employment status did not bring about the social instability that rinji-ko had.

The phrase “third industrial revolution” is not necessarily in general use, nor is there consensus on its meaning. From the standpoint of those who view the technological innovation currently in progress as the “fourth industrial revolution,” the widespread application of computers, developed in the US in the 1940s, to industry from the 1970s onward is often referred to as the “third industrial revolution,” but there are also theorists such as Jeremy Rifkin who use the “third industrial revolution” to describe the developments underway since the dawn of the 21^st century. Here, we are using the terms as defined by the German and Japanese governments.

The third industrial revolution was propelled by dramatic improvement in the performance of integrated circuits (IC). Moore’s Law, stating that the number of transistors on an IC chip doubles every 18 months, has proven valid as an empirical rule up to the present day. In the 1970s and 1980s, this led to advances in industrial production such as numerically controlled machine tools, flexible manufacturing systems, computer aided design (CAD), and computer aided manufacturing. At the time these technologies were generally referred to as microelectronics, and West Germany and Japan were leading the way. In 1985 National Institute of Employment and Vocational Research, the predecessor of the JILPT, invited government, labor, and management representatives and researchers from 29 countries and held a Symposium on Microelectronics and Labor. In 1986, the Institute and Science Center Berlin jointly organized a workshop called Responses to New Technologies: The Experiences of West Germany and Japan.

West Germany and Japan had been quick to recover from the global recession sparked by the first oil crisis in 1973 and the second in 1979, and their economic competitiveness was highly admired. With regard to Japan in particular, there was a widespread consensus that Japanese-style employment practices, which sought to cope with economic fluctuations while minimizing layoffs by reassigning employees, were also effective for dealing with structural changes due to technological innovation, adapting to evolving technology by changing the content of business operations and work duties. In 1974, immediately after the first oil crisis, the Japanese government implemented the Employment Adjustment Subsidy Scheme, which drew on employment insurance reserves to provide subsidies to employers that paid leave allowance rather than dismiss surplus personnel due to short-term economic cycles. This system was inspired in part by the West German subsidy scheme. Then, in 1977, the scheme was expanded to grant companies subsidies for retaining employees when there were surplus personnel due to deeper changes in the industrial structure as well. From the 1990s onward, this scheme was criticized as having impeded the shift in the industrial structure through greater external turnover in the labor market, but in 1970 and 1980s it was viewed positively, because stabilization of employment through personnel reassignments within companies meant that labor unions more positively embraced new technologies.

At the 1985 symposium I just mentioned, Shojiro Ujihara, then the director general of the Institute, said: “Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to combining technology and human labor. One entails rigidly subdividing people’s tasks and filling each position with a worker who specializes in that area, and the other entails training workers to have as wide a range of competencies as possible, and expanding the range of work that they actually do, through wide-ranging on-the-job training (OJT), reassignments, and dispatching employees to help out in other departments. As microelectronics play an ever more important role, it is both necessary and desirable to choose the latter approach.” These are fitting words to inscribe on a monument to an era when the Japanese employment system was at a zenith of global approval. Although it totally contradicts the policies that prevail today, the 1985 statement is interesting in light of the debate unfolding today, in that the need to adapt to the technological innovations of microelectronics was given as the grounds for the statement, while today we are again facing the need to adapt to technological progress.

During this era, the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese labor policy increasingly turned away from non-permanent employment forms and toward support and strengthening of the Japanese employment system. The above-described Employment Adjustment Subsidy Scheme was a classic example of this trend, and other examples were seen in the policy toward employment of elderly workers, where an employment quota system focused on connecting workers to the external labor market was abolished and there was a shift toward raising the mandatory retirement age and encouraging continued employment. Also, in vocational education and training policy, emphasis was shifted from public vocational training facilities to support for OJT and other in-house education and training. The dual economic structure that was viewed so problematically during the rapid economic growth period was scarcely discussed anymore. In addition to part-time workers, the 1985 Worker Dispatching Act created a new class of non-permanent workers, known as dispatched workers or temporary staff, but at the time these were primarily women and there was little change in male employment forms, meaning there was scant attention paid to employment forms as a social problem.

Meanwhile, in order to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, in 1985 Japan enacted Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and there were gradual changes to employment management, which had thus far been carried out on a gender basis. However, the 1985 Act was non-binding, and a growing number of companies responded by placing employees on separate tracks, with all male employees on the sogo-shoku (or career) track, making them eligible for progressive promotions, while the vast majority of women were on the ippan-shoku (or non-career) track keeping them as rank-and-file employees. It was not until after the 1997 amendment of Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and in actuality not until the 21^st century, that Japanese companies truly began to utilize female employees as a part of the core workforce.

During the first phase of the third industrial revolution, Japan surpassed the US as the most modernized nation, but in the latter phase, the US became a global leader and Japan lagged behind. Japan’s average annual growth rate, which was on the order of 5% during the 1980s, began to fluctuate between 0 and 2% in the 1990s, falling below the US’s 3 to 5%. Japan, which had led the way in microelectronics innovation, gradually fell further and further behind during the next wave of innovation in information and communications technology, or ICT. The phrase “new economy,” coined in America, gained currency worldwide.

The roots of the ICT revolution lie in the 1980s. Offices, which had been slower than factories to adopt microelectronics, became automated in the 1980s thanks to widespread adoption of the personal computer. Then in the 1990s use of the Internet spread rapidly, and a business model in which individuals exchanged massive volumes of data from computer to computer via the Internet became prevalent worldwide. However, Japan was not at the forefront of this transition.

The reason for this was the widespread use during the late 1980s and early 1990s of word processing machines that were incompatible with one another, rather than mutually compatible computers, in Japanese workplaces. This meant Japan was slow to get on board when the Internet took over in the 1990s, trapped in an evolutionary dead end, so to speak, where the only way out was extinction. In the late 1990s, more Japanese companies finally began using word processing and spreadsheet software on broadly compatible computers, but businesses were slow to adopt the Internet, and its application to business-to-business and business-to-customer operations was delayed. It has been pointed out that this stemmed from the differences between the Western and Japanese business models, with the clearly defined tasks and strictly demarcated sets of duties of the Western business model leading to a strong need for sharing of digital data over electronic networks, whereas Japanese employment and business practices entailing sharing of analog information through close communication within, and even between companies impeded the growth of communication via ICT devices. One could say that the same unique qualities that made Japan such a powerhouse during the microelectronics era proved to be an obstacle in the era of ICT.

During the 1990s the mobile phone rapidly penetrated the global marketplace, and a wide variety of models emerged in Japan as well. In the 21^st century the mobile phone and Internet infrastructures began to merge, and when the smartphone arrived in 2007, it swiftly devastated the market for conventional mobile phones. Mobile phones and smartphones, enabling people to communicate or work “anytime, anywhere,” had a tremendous impact on labor practices.

On the macroeconomic front, Japan’s economic bubble deflated from 1991 to 1993, financial institutions went bankrupt one after another, and the labor market swiftly shrank. This led in the late 1990s to many middle-aged or older employees being laid off due to restructuring, and the unemployment rate rose from 2% at the beginning of the 1990s to 5% at the dawn of the 21^st century. However, what had an even greater impact on Japanese society was the growing number of young non-permanent workers. Thus far, the practice of hiring new graduates en masse had meant that nearly all young people were able to become permanent or regular employees, if we count employees of small companies and businesses. However, during the so-called “employment ice age” of the late 1990s, companies were hiring fewer new graduates, and many were forced to work on a non-permanent basis as part-timers, contract workers, or dispatched workers. They were known as “freeters,” a portmanteau word combining “free” and “arbeiter,” the German word “arbeit” being used in Japan to mean “part-time job.” Until then the non-permanent workforce had not been viewed as a social issue, since it was primarily made up of married women, but with many young men and women earning low wages in insecure, non-permanent jobs, it became the most pressing labor problem of the era. Fair treatment and more secure employment for non-permanent workers remained a major policy concern over the next 20 years.

One of the changes in employment forms due to the ICT revolution is that traditional manufacturing-type cottage industries have drastically decreased, and there has been a corresponding rise in the number of home-based workers who work with ICT technology. However, the government’s response has been limited in terms of guidelines, and the labor laws have not been revised. The existing framework for work outside the regular workplace has also been applied to company employees “telecommuting” from home. Also, this period saw a surge in another employment form worthy of attention, namely dispatched day laborers. In this scheme, fitting into the framework of on-call work or worker dispatch, which has been controversial in Western nations, workers register with staffing agencies that contact them by mobile phone when there is a job to do, and they come to the workplace. It was noted that not only was this form of employment highly unstable, there were various intermediary fees of uncertain nature charged, and a 2012 legal amendment made the model illegal in principle, but this labor market still exists and many participants have simply shifted to registering with day-labor brokering services.

Today, the technical advances known as the fourth industrial revolution, and the social changes it causes, are beginning to transform countries all over the world. Its core innovations are the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (AI), both of which make use of big data. The Internet of Things involves converting information from a variety of sources, including factory equipment, traffic, and individuals’ health, into digital data sent over connected networks, and analyzing and utilizing these data to generate new value. AI involves computers learning by themselves and making decisions within a certain scope. Automated driving employing AI is already in the trial stages. Meanwhile, 3D printers enable anyone to fabricate complex objects. Amid all these technological progresses, in recent years the sharing economy has been rapidly expanding worldwide, and matching of service providers and users over the Internet makes it possible for individuals to provide their idle assets, or use their free time to provide services, to others. In addition to digital platform-based driving services like Uber and accommodations services like Airbnb, the employment forms known as “crowd work” is drawing considerable attention.

The German government has been implementing the national policy of “Industry 4.0” since 2013, seeking to lead the world as a super-advanced industrialized nation, and since 2015 has been holding discussions on the employment and labor field that it is terming Arbeiten 4.0 (Work 4.0). The country’s White Paper on Work 4.0 released in November 2016, in addition to policies on vocational education and training and ways of working in the digital age, makes proposals for addressing the rise in self-employment through crowd work, platforms and so forth, including both policy directions and legal protections for economically dependent, quasi-employed independent contractors.

Under these circumstances, in March 2017, the Action Plan for the Realization of Work Style Reform, outlining directions for national labor policy, was formulated in Japan. However, it mainly sets forth strategies to address serious social issues arising late in the third industrial revolution, such as fairer treatment of non-regular workers and countermeasures against excessively long working hours. The non-regular workers discussed here are limited to three types that rose to prominence during the postwar period of rapid economic growth, namely part-time workers, fixed-term contract workers, and temporary agency (or dispatched) workers. The policy proposals for non-regular workers are in line with those advanced in the EU in the 1990s and 2000s, but in the meantime, new forms of non-standard employment are already emerging one after another. The Action Plan for the Realization of Work Style Reform refers to new ways of working adapted to the current era as “flexible work styles,” and aims to promote their adoption and thereby resolve social issues.

Three work styles are proposed in the plan. The first is telework or telecommuting, including mobile work, as applied to employees rather than independent contractors, enabling them to work under employment contracts more flexibly and utilize time and location more effectively. While this model can enable employees to work while engaged in child care or nursing care, it has been noted that it runs the risk of leading to overly long working hours. The second is self-employed telework, including crowd work, by which independent contractors can work freely. Here as well various potential problems have been point out, including unilateral imposition of changes in work contents, unreasonably low compensation and delays in payment, and unauthorized diversion of copyrighted works temporarily delivered during proposal process. The third style, while overlapping somewhat with the other two, is active encouragement of side jobs and multiple jobs. The government convened a study group last year and formulated guidelines for each work style based on the group’s report.

Broad trends in employment forms of the fourth industrial revolution, whether inside or outside the scope of employment contracts, are predicted to be (1) a shift toward working “anytime, anywhere” as temporal and spatial restrictions become less important, and (2) a shift from contracts for cohesive and clearly defined long-term jobs to contracts for short-term or intermittent tasks. Labor law’s response to these sweeping social changes is sure to be a significant challenge in the coming years.

The existing legislation governing working conditions, formulated on the premise that workers carry out long-term continuous jobs at certain places such as factories and offices, is not fully capable of accommodating the transition to “working anytime, anywhere” and the shift “from jobs to tasks,” and its effectiveness is sure to decline. If the current laws are forcibly applied to these work forms without adaptation, it will mean the state monitoring the diverse times and places where people work and supervising operations down to the ordering of individual tasks, which may deprive workers of their freedom. It would be desirable to respond by fundamentally reconstructing the collective labor-management relations system, as a mechanism for governing working conditions, while maintaining workers’ freedom to the greatest possible extent. Although it may sound somewhat idealistic, one can envision regulations that look beyond spatial and temporal frameworks and divisions between individual jobs or tasks, and take into account the loose (Internet-based) connections among independent contractors, which form the basis of future labor law when coupled with a universal safety net that transcends the government’s definitions of employment forms.

In Japan, labor unions within specific companies became the norm after World War II, and the systems constructed to represent various parties’ interests and determine working conditions are adapted to the eras of the second and third industrial revolutions. However, the age of the fourth industrial revolution is approaching or has already arrived, and there appears to be growing need for new systems based on the changing paradigms of this era.