"I'm certain that in the near future, carpenters as we know them today will disappear. Even now, nearly all of them work as 'one-man bosses' who can't recruit new apprentices. So most of them are subcontracting their services to homebuilding companies."
So says Tomihisa Sato, director of the carpenters union in Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture, to Shukan Gendai (April 15-22).
In the case of carpenters, along with an already acute labor shortage and lack of people to take over existing businesses, demographic trends will mean fewer available workers across the board. And the generally low wages are hardly conducive to recruitment.
Well, we can always bring in some foreigners to get the job done, right? Not anymore, asserts Hirotake Kanisawa, professor at the Shibaura Institute of Technology.
"With the decline in the yen's value, technical trainees from Vietnam and elsewhere have already stopped coming to Japan," he says. "Foreign laborers have already been snatched up by South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. And Japanese carpenters can double or triple their incomes by working abroad."
Shukan Gendai predicts the imminent demise of 42 occupations. Another occupational field already facing serious peril is truck drivers.
"In the old days I could earn about a million yen a month," a 64-year-old long-distance trucker operating out of Saitama tells the magazine. "Now, with limits imposed on maximum driving hours and restrictions on speed, I need to go flat-out just to clear ¥300,000.
"I can't see how a young person would take on this work," he mutters. "They'd never be able to build a house or get married. Raising a family's no more than a pipe dream. Once my generation is gone, I wonder who'll drive the trucks."
Worker shortages in various job sectors are already impacting on people's daily lives in a variety of ways.
"When Chiba Prefecture was struck by a major typhoon in 2019, it took 19 days to completely restore power to the affected areas," notes Economist magazine's Hidetoshi Tashiro. "The main reason for the long delay was the lack of electrical workers. And due to the labor shortage in civil engineering, roads aren't getting repaired, or bridges reinforced."
From around 2030, when Japan's postwar baby boomers reach age 80, demand for care workers can be expected to take a sharp leap upward. But new job candidates will be few and far between.
"Recently more care facilities have been adopting IT and care robots, but these have had no substantial impact on lightening the workloads of care workers."
Nursing homes will have no choice but to become more selective in who they admit. A potential entrant's family members will undergo interviews, and only those whose families are not likely to complain and cause inconvenience or headaches for the staff will be admitted.
Occupations expected to feel the pinch will also include those in the public sector: policemen, fire and rescue workers, Self-Defense Force personnel and legislators in regional government assemblies.
In the service industry, meanwhile, positions such as izakaya waiters, sushi chefs, beauticians, convenience store workers, hotel and ryokan room maids, dry cleaning workers, bar hostesses and newspaper delivery staff are expected to go unfilled.
Add to these factory and farm workers of all sorts, deep-sea fishermen and the workers who process their catch.
So what to do then? Economic analyst Kohei Morinaga tells Shukan Gendai that Japan "is likely to be left with no other course but to proceed with DX (digital transformation)."
DX has been defined as a strategy of enabling business innovation predicated on the incorporation of digital technologies, which involves the building of a "digital ecosystem," achieving integration between customers, partners, employees, suppliers, and external entities, providing greater overall value to the whole.
"The shortage of carpenters, for instance, will spur more widespread use of 3D printers," says Morinaga. "And the only way to avoid the transport crisis will be to expedite the adoption of automatically driven vehicles and robots equipped with AI.
"What we're looking at is a global problem," Morinaga asserts on a note of guarded optimism. "If Japan can take the lead in resolving these problems, it will also be able to market its solutions to the rest of the world."
© Japan Today
29 Comments
Login to comment
wallace
Universal credit for all workers and funded by taxes on companies replacing them with AI.
Sal Affist
I would like to believe that supply and demand will cause enough increase in wages that will result in people choosing to work in such positions, except where the state adds so many regulations (such as the lorry drivers) that the wages are unable to be increased.
Or there may be a decent supply of Japanese pensioners who will work part-time jobs in many of the above fields in order to supplement the measly nen-kin pensions they receive.
theFu
I've been trying to get a carpenter/handyman out to fix some wood rot around the house for months. Most don't answer their phones. Only 2 have returned a call of the 15 I've tried. Only 1 came out to look over the work needed and he never provided an estimate. I called him weekly for a month before he finally said that he didn't have time available until next fall.
For other work around the house, all the estimates are 2x what I'd expected. Promises of estimates (even just 15 minutes of effort) have never been followed through on.
I have a term ... "flaky". They have so much work that they don't need to be organized or scheduled. They don't show up on scheduled days and don't communicate at all that they won't be coming.
gcFd1
This is already taking place in medical fields.
TaiwanIsNotChina
We're going to see a hollowing out of the arts field. Software I don't know: we could see an increasing tolerance for bugs and lousy software that AI could generate. Or it could be like the rest of engineering and people demand quality from a human. If we had humanoid robots, we could see some more blue collar jobs eliminated, but we haven't seen that yet. I guess in short, the arts will suffer and customer service will take a nosedive, but there is nothing new about that.
GBR48
The most valuable resource of all, is skilled manual labour. The Yen has declined a little, sterling much more. You need to look to the UK for the nightmare scenario - the first post-developed economy. Japan is just starting to slide down that slope. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are competing for migrant labour, as well as SK, Taiwan and Singapore. The winners will be the ones who entice enough migrant labour to keep their economies in growth. That's real growth, not 'slightly better than the pandemic'.
As for what will happen as jobs/skills vanish, it has happened before. When the Romans pulled out of Britain around 409AD. It's called the Dark Ages.
DX is a fantasy. Science fiction. The sums don't add up, the tech isn't there and there won't be enough people to do it. Folk will just import what they can, and make do as best they can.
dagon
In this "DX" ,Morinaga's job of analyzing the economy that could succinctly state that these jobs do not provide living wages in an unfree job market can be easily automated by GPT4. The dismal science of economic prediction with its history of errors can be done far better by LLM without all the propaganda.
The carpenters will outlast the economists.
Moonraker
Once again, we see the truth hinted at - this time with regard to carpenters - that many Japanese can earn more overseas AND actually have a better standard of living. It's amazing how salaries don't rise, despite the demand for such workers. What other reason could there be than that industry associations maintain strict discipline over members and fix salaries?
kohakuebisu
Only one of many possible solutions. Almost all regular post and beam framed houses now use precut wood that slots together in a day. It is also possible to prefab entire walls that are finished on both sides and just need to be bolted together.
The other partial solution, which we're now seeing in Japan, is a growth in DIY. DIY used to be essentially a rich person's hobby in Japan. Its now something ordinary folks do. This is because a. Japanese people are no longer rich enough to pay increasing few existing tradies to do stuff and b. fewer Japanese men work as full corporate-slave salarymen who are never at home to do DIY.
virusrex
That has always been the case in medical fields, the jobs are famous for being extremely demanding, and stressing, so even if good salaries are given there are always places where lack of people interested working there make services very difficult to provide, doctors of course, but nurses or technical positions have quite low salaries for the demands of the work, searching for anything that can help with this is also a constant in medical services, in too many places the only practical solution until now is to reduce the quality of the service, specially to overwork everybody which ends up just making everything worse in the long term.
PsiQ
Raise wages to attract workers? Nah! How about some DX pipe dreams? ¯\(ツ)/¯
PsiQ
Edit: If carpenters are paid ¥8000/hr, we wouldn't have a shortage. Full stop.
hayneda
In the US - the trades (air con/hvac, electricians, plumbers, roofers, handyman, etc) are very high profit - 100,000+ a year job @ no college with the individuals who own those companies fabulously rich. Not saying the US is better in any means, but am saying if allowed the free market will fix it.
Supply and demand is always in force. It is just a matter of people being cheap and not wanting to pay market rates. When things get necessary enough, people pay.
https://www.indeed.com/career/truck-driver/salaries
Truck driver ~83,000 USD on average.
Also - DX is a dream to solve labor shortages. Most of what can be done for awhile (booking airplane tickets on your phone), already has been done and commoditized. DX is just a buzzword for some vague notions.
I do agree on the DIY comments - shift of work to the "end consumer" will just continue in the name of self-service. DX is just a way to facilitate that shift. The real labor market will be those employees who are able to handle all of the "self-service" work that get piled on the "Service-providers" around them.
Aly Rustom
Shukan Gendai predicts the imminent demise of 42 occupations. Another occupational field already facing serious peril is truck drivers.
"In the old days I could earn about a million yen a month," a 64-year-old long-distance trucker operating out of Saitama tells the magazine. "Now, with limits imposed on maximum driving hours and restrictions on speed, I need to go flat-out just to clear ¥300,000.
I worked as a truck driver here. It is hard, the hours are long, and for me the pay was bad. The conditions were terrible.
"I can't see how a young person would take on this work," he mutters. "They'd never be able to build a house or get married. Raising a family's no more than a pipe dream. Once my generation is gone, I wonder who'll drive the trucks."
My sentiments exactly. Nothing more to say.
Well, we can always bring in some foreigners to get the job done, right? Not anymore, asserts Hirotake Kanisawa, professor at the Shibaura Institute of Technology.
"With the decline in the yen's value, technical trainees from Vietnam and elsewhere have already stopped coming to Japan," he says.
That is also happening in the English teaching field. People are leaving in droves.
"Foreign laborers have already been snatched up by South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.
For the English teachers, the word out is go to S Korea. That's what I'm hearing. those that don't have families here are leaving to go there.
And Japanese carpenters can double or triple their incomes by working abroad."
yup. And the narrative here being pushed is how Japan is so much safer and cleaner and better and all that. BUT the fact is the minute they actually step out and realize that they are not going to be locked in dungeons and be eaten by dragons if they go to the west they actually like it there and stay.
People have been complaining about this for decades. the chickens have come home to roost.
Exactly. This mercantilist/ fascist control of the economy by the bureaucrats is what has led to many of the above problems.
1glenn
The problems regarding Japanese workers are unique to Japan, and caused by Japanese customs and laws. They can be changed.
Septim Dynasty
Most Japanese will jump out of the country if given a chance at stable employment, overseas citizenship, and personal growth abroad. It's already happening with the stealth capital flight and immigration of Japanese elites abroad.
You won't see any overseas media to cover this topic but Japanese ones have been discussing it since the Abe era. After COVID-19, the expatriation of wealth and people out of Japan has steadily risen.
Even if Japan imports Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians to solve Japan's labor shortage with the rules towards easy permanent residency, I doubt they will stay as the Yen continues getting weakened.
Aly Rustom
Septim Dynasty
Spot on!
PsiQ
Septim Dynasty
Many, yes. Many wouldn't. Living in the West has many problems and the income/cost-of-living/lifestyle/working-hours imbalance can be quite severe in places like Canada.
The "attracting immigrants" crowd continually fails to mention the "no shared citizenship" elephant in the room. It's a huge red flag for all potential immigrants. They either have to choose to give up on their homeland completely (rare!) or always feel like a legal outsider. On top of that, their own children have to choose! Yeah, I definitely tell my foreign friends "think twice before looking at women in Japan. Think twice before considering anything but a temporary job here. Maybe think three times."
TaiwanIsNotChina
I suspect 99% of those that leave Japan will find this issue much better in Canada.
EFD
AI. And it won't get drunk at the rest stop or get hopped up on meth and then run down the family on its way home from vacation either.
This article, like most doom and gloom Kuchikomi articles is both overly alarmist and misguided. The medium term challenge is no longer a lack of labor, but will shortly become an issue of AI doing all of our jobs.
japancat
Mmmm ?? Good question.....I give up !......how will society cope?
TaiwanIsNotChina
You're right, it will just run down the same family because AI don't know no better. And there won't be any liability for the car manufacturer that made it all happen.
TaiwanIsNotChina
Sorry truck manufacturer.
purple_depressed_bacon
Well Japan's already heading in that direction and they're not exactly jumping at the bit to attract foreign talent to make up for the losses so they've kind of backed themselves into a corner. The working demographic that the country currently does have will probably sooner or later see the light and realize that there are more opportunities afforded to them outside of Japan and leave because who doesn't want better pay, better benefits, good amount of PTO, and an overall better standard of living?
Sven Asai
Society can’t cope, but hopefully somehow come up with some measures that cushion the deep fall or complete implosion.
Peter Neil
Inevitable entropy.