Labour deficit means companies are freed from having to keep excess staff and can focus on what they are best at
Ageing Japan has a problem with its plumbing. The country sits atop 740,000 kilometres of water pipes, of which just over a fifth are past their 40-year, legally recognised working life. And as the pipes decay and leak, the nation’s water engineers grey and creak. In a shrinking population, the number of Japanese employed in the industry is 36 per cent below its peak while the average age of those left toiling on the mains is rising.
After the 1980s bubble burst, when the government was in terror of mass unemployment, companies were induced by tax breaks to hold on to staff even as that hurt their profitability and nimbleness. Strict labour laws doubled the burden by making it very hard to lay people off. One of the most striking consequences of this was that companies had to create divisions and businesses to store their excesses of staff.
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