This timely and excellent analysis of the changing employment system in Japan greatly improves our understanding of what it is like to be a dispatched worker (haken) in contemporary Japan and discourse about nonregular employment, of which haken is only one of various categories such as temporary, contract, part-time, etc.
Currently the government is debating reforms targeting nonregular workers as single mothers and others lobby for various improvements such as lifting restrictions that exclude them from company pension plans. Employers resist such reforms precisely because the near doubling of nonregular employment as a percentage of all jobs over the past two decades is driven by the need for cost savings, a shift facilitated by deregulation. With one-third of the workforce presently engaged on relatively unfavorable terms as nonregular employees with low wages in dead-end jobs with little job security and benefits, the stakes of improving conditions are high since "the existing safety net and welfare systems ... are devised mainly to protect regular workers."
The most powerful sections of this superb book draw on the author's fieldwork as a haken at two companies. There is a rich literature discussing the causes and consequences of expanding nonregular employment in Japan, but nothing quite like this fly-on-the-wall perspective in English that enables readers to understand the experiences and perspectives of individual workers. It is one thing to make sweeping generalizations about the implications of various categories of nonregular employment, quite another to embed oneself in the situation and report from the front lines.