Unpaid Work and the Labor Market : focusing on young atypical waking -wanen

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In Japan, engaging in irregular forms of employment has been a typical pattern for married women. Yet recently, an increasing number of young men and women are also participating in the irregular employment market as casual or dispatch workers and have earned the name 'freeters' ('free' from the English word 'freelance' and 'ter' from the German word for worker arbeiter). While the concentration of married women in the casual labour market never emerged as an issue, the growth in young freeter is regarded as a serious social problem. In fact, married women are not even included in the freeter concept, something that can be seen clearly in the way that the Japanese government has framed the problem.Through a study of working women aged 25 to 34 years of age in Japan and a reading of key primary and secondary sources. we argued that the way in which the problem of the growing relative size of the causal labour force in Japan has been framed around the concept of freeter serves once again to make invisible married women's precarious position in the labour market or their contribution in the productive domain. This paper is based on thorough analysis of official and media discourses surrounding the freeter, we highlight the ways in which the labour of married women has once again been rendered invisible. We propose an alternative model for understanding the growing size of the causal labour force in Japan and .suggest ways of tackling the problems of insecurity, poverty and underemployment associated with this.