Can More Flexible Workforces Solve Society’s Problems?

The founder and CEO of Pasona Group, Japan’s second-largest provider of temporary staff, has spent his life advocating the idea that a more independent and flexible workforce benefits businesses as well as workers. This was revolutionary talk in Japan in 1976, when Yasuyuki Nambu started his first temporary staffing agency to help housewives reenter the workforce. “Japan Inc.” was famous for its philosophy of lifetime employment, and its businesses were dismissive of what they called non-regular workers. (Japanese employment laws define regular workers (pdf) as those with open-ended, full-time, direct jobs — 35 hours or more per week as wage-earning employees, not contractors, with no defined end date.)

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