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Abstract

I investigate the design and implementation of Japan's Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) program in the context of a growing global trend toward liberalization of guest worker programs. The SSW is built upon the guest worker program — the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). TITP workers may transition to the SSW, thereby obtaining the freedom to change employers and other rights. I compare the structure of labor mobility governance in the TITP and the SSW. The TITP is rooted in the privatization of mobility control, in which the state delegates mobility governance to private brokerage agencies. In the SSW, the state reverses the privatization of mobility governance by withdrawing the regulatory power from brokerage agencies and transferring the power to administrative ministries. By drawing on data collected over 14 months in Japan, I show how the freedom to change employers is difficult to obtain on the ground. The shift of mobility governance from brokers to the state could not eliminate control held by brokers who withhold required documents for employer changes. Ministries erect barriers to balance labor supply among industries that have impeded workers’ employer changes across industries (such as from agriculture to the food industry). Moreover, workers’ precarity persists due to inadequate legal protections and regulations on brokers. The discrepancies between policy intentions and implementation outcomes demonstrate three major challenges to liberalizing guest worker programs: lifting structural constraints on labor mobility built into guest worker programs, handling inherent conflicts between permitting employer change and meeting labor demand in noncompetitive sectors, and regulating brokers and employers for labor protection.

Keywords

temporary labor migration liberal reform mobility governance brokerage Japan

Introduction

Temporary labor migration policies/programs are created to hire migrant laborers in 3D (difficult, dirty, and dangerous) fields such as agriculture, construction and service sectors that are experiencing a labor shortage (Martin 2017). The low wages and poor working conditions make native workers shun 3D jobs, and the labor demand is thus fulfilled by migrant labor whose freedom and rights are highly constrained: they are bonded to specific employers with no freedom to change employers; their mobilities are regulated to prevent absconding and overstay; and they are forbidden to bring family members to host states and settle permanently (Lewis et al. 2015; Martin 2017). The wage gap between migrant workers’ home countries and host countries motivates them to migrate and accept labor contracts that restrict their freedom and rights. For employers, the pressure to improve wages and working conditions is relieved as they do not need to compete to attract and retain laborers. Therefore, guest worker programs hinge on constraining labor mobility and rights to meet labor demand.

However, a trend in policy reform to liberalize guest worker programs has taken shape in East Asia and Gulf States. In 2007, Taiwan allowed migrant workers to change employers in circumstances where the employers were at fault, such as abuse and business closure, which was subsequently followed by South Korea and Japan (Ministry of Labor 2007; Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2017; Kwak and Wang 2022). Qatar first allowed migrant workers to change or quit jobs without employer permission in 2020, and subsequently Kuwait and Saudi Arabia adopted similar reforms (Sherman 2022). As of 2021, migrant workers in all the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (except Saudi Arabia) also no longer needed employer permission to leave the country (ibid). East Asian states have further expanded workers’ rights: allowing workers to change employers after they finish a labor contract and/or transition to other status, and creating pathways for workers to settle permanently (Kwak and Wang 2022; Lin 2022; Kim and Song 2023; Immigration Services Agency 2024a¹).

Nevertheless, once free to change employers, workers will naturally gravitate toward employers/occupations who offer better wages and conditions, which, in turn, will result in higher rates of labor vacancies for those lacking competitive conditions. Hence, the leniency in policy reform generates conflicts between permitting employer change and meeting employers’ labor demand. In this circumstance, how is the policy of permitting employer change implemented on the ground? Labor mobility under guest worker programs is often monitored and constrained by employers and intermediaries (e.g., for-profit brokers) to prevent absconding and overstay (Lewis et al. 2015; Martin 2017; Surak 2018). When employer change becomes permissible, how does the migration governance change? How do workers experience the change?

To address these questions, this article investigates Japan's Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) program, which is built upon its guest worker program — the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). The TITP hires low-skilled workers from China and Southeast Asia under the guise of “technology learners” to work in labor-intensive 3D fields. To alleviate labor shortages, the government established the SSW in 2018, which includes two visa categories: SSW-1 and SSW-2 (ISA 2024a). Interns in the TITP can transition to SSW-1 after they finish the 3-year labor contract and earn the conditional freedom to change employers; after five years, they can transition to SSW-2, which grants an additional right of family reunification (ibid).

To maximize the economic benefits of employing migrant labor while minimizing their social, cultural, and political impact (Rogers 1985), guest worker programs are managed on a “use and discard” basis that places strict control over labor mobility, and eradicates any possibility of family reunification and social integration (Yeoh 2004, 2006). In this context, the establishment of SSW in Japan is a dramatic policy shift from the conventional exclusionary approach toward low-skilled migrant workers. In this article, I analyze the policy design of the SSW program, and examine workers’ experiences of changing employers during the status transition from intern to SSW-1 and after obtaining SSW-1 by drawing on data from a course of 14-month fieldwork in Japan (three months in 2018 plus 11 months between 2022 and 2023).

As the core design of guest worker programs lies in prohibiting workers from changing employers, liberalization of such programs is primarily manifest in allowing employer changes. Under the TITP, the state delegates labor management and mobility governance to for-profit brokerage agencies who are responsible for recruiting interns, handling documentation (e.g., visa), and controlling labor mobility. By contrast, as employer change is permissible under the SSW program, the state attempts to reverse the privatization of migration governance by withdrawing the regulatory power that it has delegated to brokerage agencies under the TITP and transfers the power to administrative ministries to oversee employer change in the SSW. Brokerage agencies are allowed to register in the SSW to support workers’ life and work as consultation agencies while labor recruitment and documentation tasks are left to employers and workers.

However, despite the attempt to take control away from brokers, broker control persists, as does workers’ precarity. When transitioning status from intern to SSW-1, the rigid documentation requirements subject workers to the control of brokers and their original employers, which makes the freedom to change employers difficult to attain. To avoid SSW workers’ overconcentration in cities and certain industries, the ministries set a hurdle by requiring a specific skill exam for entering each industry. This hurdle makes it difficult to change employers from industries with poor conditions to ones with relatively good conditions (such as from agriculture to manufacture of food and beverages, hereafter food industry for short). These obstacles drive workers to brokers for services, but due to inadequate legal protections and regulations of broker activities, SSW workers may become more precarious than their counterparts in the TITP. Consequently, the SSW has not attracted adequate migrant workers to fulfill labor demand. Substantial discrepancies have arisen between its intentions and implementation outcomes.

This article illustrates how and why the corresponding freedom to change employers under liberal reforms of guest worker programs is difficult to attain on the ground. It also advances understanding of the relational dynamics between state and private brokers by elucidating how brokers become integral to the governance structure in guest worker programs, and how broker control is difficult to eliminate despite the shift of labor governance from private to public. It sheds light on three main challenges to liberalizing guest worker programs: lifting structural constraints over labor mobility that have been built in guest worker programs, handling inherent conflicts between permitting employer change and meeting employers’ labor demand in noncompetitive sectors, and regulating brokers and employers to protect migrant workers.

Dynamics of Labor Mobility Governance: Private Versus Public

A burgeoning scholarship on labor migration is attempting to unpack the relational dynamics between states and intermediaries that are pivotal in shaping migration flows. Conceptualized as migration industry, these intermediaries broadly include for-profit brokers, nonprofit organizations, or actors whose roles in labor migration can largely be categorized as facilitation, control, and rescue (Hernández-León 2005; Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013). Due to the deficiency of state capacity in managing labor migration, it is common for states to outsource tasks of management to intermediaries (Palmgren 2022; Huang 2023). Although nonprofit organizations may be involved in migrant labor management via their supportive activities, it is a common practice for states to adopt market mechanisms and outsource migration management to for-profit brokers (Tseng and Wang 2013; Surak 2018). On the labor-sending end, brokers’ roles notably concentrate on labor recruitment and documentation to enhance labor export, which is a critical component of national development for many sending states (Lindquist 2010; Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012; Hernández-León 2020). On the labor-receiving end, brokers’ tasks are heavily weighted to monitor and control workers’ mobility to ensure timely return, which mainly results from receiving states’ security concerns (Kalicki 2022; Huang 2023). On both ends, the relation between states and brokers is delegation or devolution, which indicates a top-down authorization of for-profit brokers to manage labor mobilities on formal or informal bases (Surak 2018).

Nevertheless, when guest worker programs are reformed to permit employer change, the governance over labor mobility has to go through a dramatic shift. Often, when employer change is permissible, it becomes imperative to lift broker control, which requires the state to withdraw the regulatory power that it has delegated to brokers. Extant scholarship in labor migration has rarely explored this reverse of the privatization of migration governance. Only a few studies have addressed how states strongly regulate brokers, delegitimize them, or attempt to eliminate them by fostering state-owned labor agencies (Xiang 2012; Alpes 2013; Deshingkar et al. 2019). Christina Siracusa and Kristel Acacio's case study of the Philippines shows how its migration governance has gone through different dynamics between public and private governance: from state manipulation to privatization, reversing to state manipulation, and then mixing state and private governance (Siracusa and Acacio 2004). However, these studies all concentrate on migrants-sending contexts while receiving contexts are left understudied.

A crucial case study in the receiving context is South Korea's revision to its guest worker program in 2004, which transferred power of migrant labor governance from private brokers to the state (Surak 2018). However, the revision was not meant to change the key feature of constraining labor mobility in the guest worker program; rather, the power transfer aimed to continue constraining labor mobility to prevent contract abandonment and overstay. Thus, its intentions deviate substantially from a liberalized migration program, which grants migrant workers the freedom to change employers and the permission to remain in the host country over long periods of time. Such a reform requires states to lift broker control that has been built into guest worker programs. Scholarship on labor migration has yet to investigate the lifting of broker control on the ground.

Furthermore, permitting workers to change employers generates the challenge of how to meet labor demand in industries that are unattractive to migrant workers. Under guest worker programs, employers’ labor demand could be fulfilled by hiring migrant workers despite low wages and poor working conditions. This is built upon two conditions: constraints on migrant workers’ mobility and a lack of labor market competition (Gibbons et al. 2019). However, liberal reforms to guest worker program bring about competition among employers as the constraints on migrant workers’ mobility are lifted and workers become free to choose employers. Namely, employers have to compete with each other to attract and retain migrant workers to meet labor demand, such as by offering competitive wages and working conditions. Nevertheless, employers in certain industry fields will struggle to have their labor demand met partly due to the disadvantaged industry-specific conditions. Employers in these industries will have to continue hiring workers through guest worker programs, which constrain workers’ freedom and bond them to specific employers. However, the route of guest worker programs may not be sufficient to meet labor demand, which is one crucial motivation for policymakers to create liberalized programs such as the SSW. As such, it is challenging to manage conflicts between free movement of laborers and employers’ labor demand in noncompetitive sectors.

The liberal reform to guest worker programs also brings forth questions regarding labor precarity. Under guest worker programs, scholars have criticized how the prohibition of employer change leads to labor precarity from exploitation, forced labor to other human rights and labor rights problems (Lewis et al. 2015; Parreñas 2021; Kim and Song 2023). These problems are exacerbated by the privatization of migration governance that empowers broker control over labor mobility. Hence, although the privatization of migration governance enhances states’ control capacity over labor mobility and fulfills employers’ labor demand, it generates challenges of regulating brokers, giving rise to the seemingly intractable problem of labor precarity (Tseng and Wang 2013; Kemp and Raijman 2014; Anderson and Franck 2019). If restrictions on employer change and privatization of migration governance are the sources of labor precarity, it is natural to ask: if the state allows migrant workers to change employers and withdraws the control power from brokers, will workers’ precarity be resolved or alleviated?

Amid a global trend of heightened use of temporary migrant labor and narrowed pathways to permanent immigration, studies have shown how migrant workers confront various forms of precarity and vulnerability despite the permission to change employers. In New Zealand, although varied pathways to permanent residence are available to migrant workers of different legal statuses and skill levels, Francis Collins (2021) demonstrates that migrant workers are constantly dealing with considerable risks of losing their investment along the migratory trajectory due to the uncertainties and challenges in the process of transition to residence, such as changing policy settings and complex skill recognition systems. Similarly, in Zhan and Zhou (2020)'s study of skilled migrant workers in Singapore, migrants face insecure employment and uncertain settlement due to the tightened and complicated access to permanent residence. In their analysis, one main source of workers’ anxieties and precarities is employer control over the application of their work passes, without which workers would lose legal status within 30 days. For migrant domestic workers in Singapore, to transfer jobs, they must secure the permission of their employer/sponsor, which subjects workers to employers’ control and amplifies servitude (Parreñas, Kantachote, and Silvey 2020).

Building upon existing studies on labor migration, this article analyzes the policy design and implementation of Japan's SSW program, which is a liberal reform to the guest worker program — the TITP. I compare the labor mobility governance between the TITP and the SSW, illustrating how the privatization of mobility governance in the TITP is reversed in the SSW, in which the state attempts to abolish broker control and hands over mobility governance to administrative ministries. I examine the complicated documentation requirements on workers’ changing employers in two main occasions: transitioning visa status from intern to SSW-1, and after obtaining legal status of SSW-1. Drawing on findings from my fieldwork, I assess the implementation of the SSW on the ground, and demonstrate the persistence of broker and employer control, as well as workers’ precarity.

Data and Methods

In the summer of 2018, I conducted 3 months of fieldwork in Japan, during which I interviewed 70 Chinese migrant workers in the construction industry in the Tokyo region, including interns, undocumented workers, permanent residents, and irregular workers. I collected data through in-depth, in-person interviews and virtual interviews over WeChat (the most popular social media platform among Mandarin speakers). Durations of the interviews ranged between half an hour and three and half hours. The in-person interviews were conducted in varied locations, including workers’ dormitories, train stations, coffee shops, and restaurants. I also collected data via group discussions during workers’ get-togethers on national holidays or weekends. My interviews focused on workers’ experiences and how the SSW would affect their mobility choices.²

In May 2022, I returned to Japan and conducted 11 months of fieldwork. During the fieldwork, I was based in Tokyo where many influential humanitarian organizations (NGOs, NPOs, and labor unions) for migrants are located. I quickly built connections with these organizations through their public activities in Tokyo. After learning of my research interests and my plan of disseminating research in English, these humanitarian actors showed tremendous support in my fieldwork and involved me in varied advocacy activities.

I participated in their lobbying activities in Tokyo three times during which they urged the governmental officials to resolve problems of the TITP and the SSW and enhance labor protection. They also organized symposiums on the TITP and the SSW, and allowed me to attend. In these symposiums, speakers shared cases of migrant workers who reached out to them for assistance. They shared how they resolved each case (or failed), detailed obstacles to resolution, and provided useful official documents or data. I conducted in-depth interviews with four representatives of NGOs and NPOs, and five representatives of labor unions, all of whom had many years of experience dealing with migrant labor disputes. As the nine organizations were located in different parts of the country, I conducted four in-person interviews in Tokyo and five interviews over Zoom. The duration of the interviews was between one and three hours.

I also interviewed nine Chinese interns about how they made decisions to transition to SSW-1 and followed them as they navigated the process. These interviews were conducted either in-person in public places (e.g., restaurants) or via WeChat, lasting from half an hour to two hours. Additionally, I did one month of participant observation at a labor union shelter that accommodated migrants and refugees during October of 2022. The shelter is located in Gifu prefecture, which is in central Japan, about five hours away from Tokyo by rapid train. At the shelter, I followed four Chinese interns who sought to change employers while transitioning to SSW-1, and six Cambodian workers with SSW-1 visas who reached out for employer change. These six workers had quit their original jobs and moved into the shelter between April 2022 and October 2022. The director of the shelter is a Chinese immigrant who considered me an ally and allowed me to stay in the shelter for the duration of the month. The shelter occupied a three-floor building in which the first floor is used as an office, and the second and third floors have a few bedrooms. I cooked, ate, and stayed with these workers at this building for the entire month.

The Cambodian workers had limited Japanese skill, and I communicated with them mainly through a female Cambodian interpreter who was hired by the labor union. She migrated to Japan through the TITP, and later married a Japanese citizen. I interviewed these workers about why and how they reached out to the labor union and followed their interactions with the director as they worked to resolve their issues. The director also shared with me cases that he had dealt with, which involved interns and SSW-1 workers. He showed me documents of these cases that he had saved as records.

As a female Chinese immigrant studying in a PhD program in the United States, I also have experiences of living and studying in Japan for a few years. Fluent in Chinese, Japanese and English, I also understand some of the Chinese migrant workers’ dialects. Therefore, my positionality in the field is defined by my gender, multilanguage abilities, and the educational and immigrant background.

I use the approach of abductive analysis (Timmermans and Tavory 2012) to conduct data collection and analysis. Guided by abductive reasoning, I paid close attention to surprising observations and responses from interviewees, which led me to move forward in my fieldwork, informing my decisions about whom to interview and what questions to ask. To provide robust causal explanations for the puzzling observations, I adopt a pragmatist approach to causality (Tavory and Timmermans 2013) that entails three interrelated activities: identify causal sequences by interpreting meanings of interactions or conversations; rework a causal explanation by examining how interactions and responses vary in different situations and change over time; seek and evaluate alternative explanations from my interlocutors in fields on why and how they react, think and behave in certain ways. Through these two approaches, I specify processes that connect my data to social forces that are “invisible” and external to my observations and interviews. However, in reflecting on my data collection, I was not able to observe the recruiting process in workers’ home countries, nor did I interview governmental officials, employers or brokerage agencies. Therefore, the data collected and analyzed is limited to the perspectives of migrant workers and humanitarian actors.

Structure of Mobility Governance: A Comparison Between TITP and SSW

The original framework for the TITP could trace to the trainee program started in the 1960s, through which Japanese companies investing overseas could bring their oversea employees to Japan for training and promotion (Ministry of Justice 1998). However, beginning in the 1980s, the program became a route for Japan's small-and-medium-sized enterprises to hire migrant workers to fill labor demand in 3D fields (Sano 2002). In 1991, the government set up the Japan International Training Cooperation Organization (JITCO)³ to manage and supervise the trainee program, which is a nonprofit quasi-governmental organization under the joint auspices of five ministries⁴ (Surak 2018). Subsequently, in 1993, the Ministry of Justice expanded the trainee program and formally established the TITP (ibid). The government claimed that the purpose of the TITP was to assist developing countries by transferring technology and cultivating personnel (Sano 2002). Nevertheless, as a guest worker program, violence, abuse, and other serious labor problems had occurred, and as a response, the government revised the TITP in 2009, which placed all workers under the protection of labor laws with the legal status of “intern” (Kamibayashi 2018). Furthermore, the government promulgated the “Technical Intern Training Act” in 2016, and established the Organization for Technical Intern Training (OTIT) to replace the JITCO as a legal entity in charge of the management and supervision of the TITP (Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2025).

Despite the shift of governance from JITCO to OTIT, the implementation of the TITP remains delegated to licensed brokerage agencies that handle the recruitment and management of interns under the official name of “supervising organizations” (Surak 2018). These agencies primarily consist of cooperatives (Kumiai) — associations of agriculture, chambers of commerce, and small business associations, which provide labor recruitment services to employers by cooperating with recruiting agencies in sending countries (ibid). As of 2022, there are 3,487 licensed brokerage agencies, and 3,198 of them are small business associations, accounting for about 92% of all agencies (National Federation of Small Business Associations 2022).⁵ Among these small business associations, approximately half of them consist of less than 20 small businesses (ibid). Namely, small businesses join these associations and become members first; these associations then provide labor recruitment and management services to their members who need foreign labor. For half of these associations, the service fees that they charge member businesses account for over 90% of their total revenues (ibid).

According to the data of OTIT (2021), for a small business owner, the initial cost of joining a business association is 67,625 yen ($443),⁶ and afterwards, the business owner must pay an annual membership fee of 93,211 yen ($611). Additionally, for recruiting and managing every single intern, the employer needs to pay the association an initial fee of 341,402 yen ($2,239), a regular monthly fee of about 30,000 yen ($197) (during the first 3 years), and an irregular fee of 154,780 yen ($1,015) (ibid).⁷ Although it is employers’ responsibility to pay these fees, some of them illegally deduct these costs from workers’ salaries (House of Representatives Research Bureau Legal Investigation Office 2008).

Figure 1 demonstrates the basic structure of labor governance under the TITP. The OTIT first issues a license to qualified business associations that need to meet a few criteria, such as no record of violating immigration law or labor laws within the past 5 years (OTIT 2019a). Licensed associations then function as for-profit brokerage agencies that provide labor recruitment services to employers by cooperating with recruiting agencies in labor sending countries (OTIT 2019b). The business associations provide guidance and assistance to interns, cooperate with employers to build training plans for interns, and obtain and update visas for interns via Immigration Services Agency (OTIT 2025). To ensure the legal implementation of the program, the OTIT obligates business associations to inspect employers at least once every 3 months to check if there are any activities that run afoul of immigration and labor laws (ibid). However, as employers are the main source of profit for the associations, it is doubtful that these associations would fulfill this obligation thoroughly. Also, to avoid cancelation of the license by OTIT, business associations must keep interns from absconding and overstaying their visas, which in turn prompts them to constrain interns’ mobility.

Figure 1.

Governance Structure of the TITP.

By contrast, the SSW program does not bond workers to specific employers and allows workers to change employers. Consequently, business associations’ control over labor mobility was deemed superfluous and thus abolished. Nevertheless, to avoid workers’ overconcentration in metropolitan areas and specific regions, the state transfers labor mobility governance to four administrative ministries that oversee the 16 industry fields open to SSW, including the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (ISA 2023a). The 16 industries nearly cover all the occupational sectors in the TITP (OTIT 2023; ISA 2024b). The SSW program only allows workers to change employers among these 16 industries.

Each Ministry establishes a Council to assess SSW workers’ regional concentration, situations of regional labor shortage, and to share information collectively (ISA 2023a). Employers of SSW workers are required to join the corresponding Council based on the categorization of their business in the industrial fields (ISA 2023b, 12). Each Council adopts approaches to manage workers’ mobility, one of which is to organize skill exams to adjust workers’ movement across industry fields as skill certificates are required to enter different industrial fields (ISA 2023a).

Unlike small business associations in the TITP, the Councils in the SSW do not provide labor recruitment services to employers. Instead, employers are left on their own to find and hire workers by themselves or turn to staffing agencies in Japan or overseas (ISA 2023b). Some domestic routes for employers to search for migrant workers include the Public Employment Security Office (Harō Wāku) and job fairs organized by the immigration bureau oriented toward prospective employers and migrant workers (ibid). Additionally, to hire SSW workers, employers must build a support plan for workers that addresses 10 issues, such as orientation on life in Japan, and support for lodging and job changes (ibid). Employers are allowed to outsource the design and implementation of the plan to support organizations, which need to register with the Immigration Services Agency (ibid). It is important to note that the support organizations’ activities do not include visa application or updating, since, in principle, workers are required to apply for or update visas by themselves (ibid).

As of 2022, about 60% of the small business associations under the TITP had registered as support organizations in the SSW, and about 20% were in the application process or considering to register (National Federation of Small Business Associations 2022). The average cost for employers to outsource support activities to support organizations is 28,100 yen ($184) per SSW worker (ibid). Figure 2 illustrates the governance structure of the SSW program.

Figure 2.

Governance Structure of the SSW.

To sum up, the implementation of the TITP relies on for-profit brokerage agencies for recruiting and managing interns, handling documentation (e.g., visa), and regulating labor mobility. By contrast, the design of SSW seeks to abolish control of brokerage agencies, and transfer labor mobility governance to administrative ministries. The intermediaries’ role is reduced to one of support in matters pertaining to workers’ life and work in Japan — mainly by providing consultation and integration suggestions. Labor recruitment and documentation tasks are left to employers and workers. However, most of the brokerage agencies in the TITP continue registering in the SSW as support organizations. Their control over labor mobility similarly persists in the SSW, impeding workers’ employer changes as my fieldwork shows below.

Changing Employers Amid Transitioning from Intern to SSW-1

When transitioning from intern to SSW-1, an intern who seeks to change employers within the same industry and the same occupational sector needs to either pass the Level-3 skill test or obtain an evaluation form from their original employer, detailing skill acquisition, work and life ethics during the contract. If a worker wishes to move into a different industry or occupational sector, a skill certificate in the corresponding industry or sector is required.⁸ Also, on both occasions, the transition requires a copy of the intern's CV that had been submitted in their initial application for entry into Japan. Here, the work experience in the home country is crucial. The official definition of intern declares that all applicants must have previous work experience in the occupation that they plan to undertake once in Japan (Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2025, 21). Since many interns lack the necessary work experience, it is common for brokerage agencies in sending countries to fabricate this experience — often with cooperation from agencies in Japan. However, interns often do not know what is written on their CV as documentation is manipulated by brokerage agencies. Consequently, by withholding the required documents, brokerage agencies and employers can preempt any decisions interns may wish to make about their place of employment. In addition, to change employers, workers need to identify qualified employers who need to be officially licensed and would like to support visa upgrading. I summarize the main documentation obstacles in Table 1.

Table 1.

Documentation Obstacles for Changing Employers.

Two occasions	Original employer/broker (TITP)	Worker	New employer (SSW)
Same industry and occupation	Evaluation form; worker's CV	Skill certificate (if no evaluation form)	Qualified employer; Visa upgrading documents
Different occupation or industry	Worker's CV	Skill certificate	Qualified employer; Visa upgrading documents

Note. TITP = Technical Intern Training Program; SSW = Specified Skilled Worker.

Four Chinese interns’ experiences that I observed at the labor union shelter illustrate how these obstacles impede their effort to change employers. The four interns were nearing the end of their contracts and wanted to change to SSW-1 to continue working in Japan. Their brokerage agency (A) in Japan could help with the transition, provided they continue working for the original employer, and pay a service fee of 20,000 yuan ($2,746). Unhappy with these terms, they used their networks to locate an employer who wished to hire them and directed them to brokerage agency (B) for the transition. These interns had passed the skill test, but the certificates were withheld by A, who refused to return the certificates and sought to forcefully repatriate them to China. A booked airline tickets and deducted 35,000 yen ($230) from each intern's salary to cover a nominal COVID-test fee despite the fact that these interns did not intend to return to China.

The staff member of B (Mr. J) reached out to agency A, requesting the return of each worker's CV, skill certificate, and COVID-test fee, but his request was rejected. Having known the director of the labor union well, Mr. J brought the four interns to the shelter on October 12, 2022 for help. The director first asked the interns to join the labor union formally, which entails paying the membership fee of 1,500 yen ($10) per month. In effect, the membership empowers the director to negotiate on the workers’ behalf with the legal right of collective bargaining (dantai kōsyō). However, the representative of A (Mr. K) had become hostile during the phone negotiation, and again, during negotiation at the labor union shelter. He yelled at the director: “They (interns) are mine, why should I give [them] to him (Mr. J)?” Shocked, the director responded: “They (interns) are not your property! It is their freedom to decide who they are going to work for now [under the SSW-1 visa]. That is determined by law!” Mr. K nonetheless refused to return the documents and money, and accused the director of colluding with Agency B to try to take the interns away from him.

The case shows how workers’ employer changes generate conflicts among brokerage agencies. These agencies charge employers for the recruitment and management of interns. When transitioning to SSW-1, if interns stay with the original employers or other employers that the agencies work for, the agencies can continue making a profit. Therefore, it is to the brokerage agencies’ benefit to prevent interns from changing to employers outside of their network. They usually resist strongly when labor unions intervene to defend workers’ freedom to change employers. As the director told me, “They (brokers) think that I am here to break their rice bowl (za fanwan) (destroy one's means of making a living).” In the end, the director had to request an administrative investigation and support for this case by contacting the regional office of OTIT, through which the interns had their documents and money returned. The brokerage Agency B then organized the necessary documents and managed to change employers and switch visa status to SSW-1 for the interns.

The barriers that the four workers encountered also shed light on why the scale of SSW is much smaller than the government initially intended. In 2019, at the onset of the SSW program, the government expected to accept 345,000 SSW workers over five years (ISA 2024a).⁹ However, as of December 2023, SSW-1 workers totaled only 208,425, and a mere 37 had obtained the SSW-2 visa.¹⁰ There are two routes to obtain the SSW-1 visa: workers can apply directly in their home countries; or, interns in Japan who have finished a 3-year contract can make a status transition. The intern route accounts for about two thirds of all SSW-1 workers in 2023,¹¹ which indicates that TITP is the major source of labor for SSW. The global pandemic was presumably an obstacle for oversea applicants to enter Japan with SSW-1 visa. In 2022 when Japan reopened its border after the lockdown, 34,078 SSW-1 visa holders entered Japan, which was a dramatic increase from 9,749 in 2021. However, many qualified interns were in Japan during the pandemic. In December 2021, there were approximately 147,000¹² interns who were qualified for SSW-1 visa, but only about 39,000 of them transitioned to SSW-1. The rigid restrictions over the status transition and employer change were likely to have contributed to the program's underperformance.

Additionally, employers may not be as motivated to hire SSW workers, who receive higher wages than interns. Empirical research has shown how certain employers continue using TITP labor due to the higher wages of hiring SSW workers, the extra costs of legal status transition, and their unfamiliarity with the SSW program (Roberts and Fujita 2024). Further, SSW-1 workers have the freedom to change employers, which would empower them to bargain over wages and working conditions. Presumably, for some employers, hiring interns is much more to their benefit. However, if interns do not wish to return to their home countries when the contract expires, they must find other employers to transition to SSW-1, which is not easy. One intern who worked as a plumber shared with me the difficulties of identifying a qualified employer for the visa transition. He found Chinese foremen who were undertaking the plumbing work informally, but none of them owned a license.

Additionally, the garment industry and some other occupations that were open to interns were excluded in the SSW program.¹³ For interns in these fields, to obtain SSW-1 visa, they had to register and pass the required skill test in another industry, in addition to finding qualified employers. As such, changing employers amidst a transition from intern to SSW-1 requires complicated documents from workers, their original employers/brokerage agencies under the TITP, and their new employers under the SSW. These obstacles make it difficult to obtain the freedom to change employers on the ground.

From Agriculture to the Food Industry (SSW-1 Workers)

After attaining an SSW-1 visa, workers continue to encounter documentation obstacles when they seek to change employers across industries. The Cambodian workers who reached out to the labor union primarily worked in agriculture under SSW-1 (I introduced these workers in the section of Data and Methods). They sought to change to the food industry for several reasons. First, working conditions in agriculture are very harsh. These workers either work on farmland, exposed to high heat, wind, or rain, or in greenhouses, which can be suffocating. Agricultural work also requires a high level of physical strength. Workers must harvest agricultural products and subsequently load and unload packaged bundles. One male worker complained that he had to load and unload cabbages in large packages of about 70 kg. His weight, he said, was only about 56 kg. Moreover, agricultural work is subject to seasonal change. Busy harvest seasons may be followed by long stretches of free and unpaid time. Consequently, work time is very unstable, and workers’ salaries are not guaranteed.

Because of this instability in agriculture, the SSW program allows haken labor — a special form of dispatching workers to employers in Japan. Workers register at staffing agencies¹⁴ who assign them to specific employers to work at specified time periods. For my interviewees, this meant traversing Japan on short-term notice. One female worker shared her work arrangements from 2019 to 2022: each year from April to October, she was scheduled to work in Hokkaido, the northernmost prefecture, and then to Ehime in southern Japan from November to March. Each of her movements was preplanned by the staffing agency with which she had registered, including the airline and times of her flights, but she had to make her own arrangements for her belongings. This meant a harried end to each contract as she rushed to pack, prepare, and deliver what she could not stow through the postal service.

This frequent movement provides workers with opportunities to develop their networks. After meeting new workers at each workplace, they maintained contact with each other on Facebook. Many learned from their networks that some of their agricultural peers managed to switch to the food industry, where the working conditions were purported to be better: the work was indoors, cleaner, and stable; the workload was lighter; and the workspaces were usually furnished with air-conditioners. They then reached out to the labor union shelter that had successfully assisted their peers with the change. Nonetheless, the director of the shelter did not advise workers to quit their jobs immediately unless their employers had clearly broken the law or maintained otherwise unacceptable conditions. He shared with me how the SSW-1 was a very precarious status, and why it required special attention to its legal code.

SSW workers are under the protection of labor laws, and they have to enroll in social insurance (e.g., health insurance, unemployment insurance, and pension) and pay taxes (e.g., income tax and resident tax) (ISA 2024a). The insurance and tax fees are deducted from workers’ monthly payment. Nevertheless, the Employment Insurance Act stipulates that to apply for unemployment subsidy, workers must demonstrate continuous employment and have paid employment insurance for at least one year.¹⁵ When workers resign of their own volition (jiko tsugō), it is difficult to obtain the unemployment subsidy, even if the resignation is due to unbearable working conditions. One female Cambodian agricultural worker at the shelter shared with me that she had found herself in just such a situation. Between April 2021 and June 2022, she worked 15 months in total, and her payments were very unstable, ranging from 30,427 yen ($200) to 131,323 yen ($862) after deductions for insurances and taxes. On average, she was paid about 82,000 yen ($539) per month, which was not enough for her to make a living. She had to resign, but she was unqualified for the unemployment subsidy according to the Employment Insurance Act. Moreover, to apply for this subsidy, workers must provide a residential address. However, SSW workers typically receive board from their employers, and so their residence is inextricably bound with their employment. It is almost impossible for migrant workers to rent a place by themselves if they are unemployed in Japan. Consequently, the Cambodian worker had to move into the labor union shelter after her resignation.

Another representative of the labor union similarly criticized the problems of the SSW and the widely-held presumption that SSW workers’ situations must be better than interns in the TITP.

Everybody may think that SSW is better [than TITP], but it is not protected as much by law [as is TITP]. It asks workers to make an effort by themselves – they are on their own … There are more laws that protect interns. Interns cannot quit their job themselves, and if they are fired, we are able to protect them by law. However, if SSW workers quit, it is very difficult to combat with their employers to protect them. Simply granting the freedom to change employers is far from enough. These migrant workers are working in a foreign country, and they don't know much, so it is very difficult for them to protect themselves.

If SSW workers want to switch to a different industry or occupation, the process is very time consuming and difficult, particularly if they wish to move to popular industries that have relatively good conditions, such as the food industry.¹⁶ In 2019, based on labor demand in the food industry, the government set the quota at 30,500 SSW workers by 2023 (ISA 2024a). However, the strong labor demand and relatively good conditions in this industry had attracted more workers to register. As of 2023, 61,095 SSW-1 workers registered in this industry, accounting for about one third of all the SSW-1 workers (ISA 2023c). To prevent workers’ overconcentration in this industry, the ministry increased skill test hurdles to constrain entry: the skill exam was administered only three times per year and only in certain prefectures; registration for the exam was during variable and predetermined windows; a limit was imposed on the number of applicants at each testing site; and a lottery system was employed when the limit was surpassed.¹⁷ According to the director of the shelter, even if workers can manage to register in the exam, they usually need two or three attempts to pass. By contrast, only 23,861 workers registered in agriculture as of 2023, accounting for only about 11% of all SSW-1 workers (ISA 2023c). The scale is far below the quota of 36,500, indicating large labor vacancies left unfilled (ISA 2024a). To attract more workers, entry to agriculture was made very easy: the skill exam was administered in every prefecture; a generous array of exam dates was offered; and workers could take the exam in their native language.¹⁸

During the process of switching employers, if workers become unemployed, they will lose both income and lodging. If they remain unemployed for over three months without justifiable reasons, they may lose their legal status (ISA Q & A). Even if they can pass the exam in their desired industry, they also need to find qualified employers who will agree to process paperwork. As mentioned, in the TITP, licensed private brokers undertake labor recruitment and visa application/updating, while under the SSW, employers are left on their own to recruit migrant workers, and workers must identify qualified employers by themselves. Workers usually search for potential employers through their own networks, or turn to the support organizations assigned by their current employers (employers can outsource support of SSW workers to support organizations, most of which are registered brokerage agencies). One form of support is to assist with workers’ employer changes. Nevertheless, as workers’ current employers pay a brokerage agency to offer support, if current employers do not support an employer change, presumably the agency would not provide any necessary support to workers. As a result, workers have to turn to other brokerage agencies to search for new employers. The representative of the union shared with me the difficulties of navigating such a process, which often lead to workers’ vulnerability.

It is very complicated to find an employer and to handle paperwork at the same time. Absolutely, workers cannot do it by themselves. Mostly they would be deceived [when they search for employers or brokers on social media]. There are many cases in which workers see alluring salaries and promises of handling paperwork on SNS (social networking service or social media), but usually it turns out either the salaries are different or the promises are empty after workers pay the fees. The paperwork is extremely complicated. Only professional brokerage agencies can do it. I cannot do it. Usually, submitting all the documents in one attempt will not be successful. The immigration bureau does not admit a case [of changing employers] easily.

When workers are left on their own to search for qualified employers, it is difficult for them to identify which brokerage agencies are legal (with a license) and reliable. Under the TITP, private brokers are the key component of migrant governance, and they are subject to legal regulations concerning their responsibilities. Still, researchers have criticized the challenges of regulating brokers who charge high service fees, falsify documents, and deceive workers about labor contract and working conditions (Deshingkar et al. 2019; Li Rosenberg 2023). By contrast, under the SSW, there are no adequate regulations in place to monitor brokers and protect workers from potential deceptive behaviors or conflicts, as identified by the labor union representative above.

I summarize the hurdles of job changes from agriculture to the food industry and the common precarities in Table 2.

Table 2.

Comparison of Agriculture and Food Industry.

Issue	Agriculture	Food industry
Working conditions	Outdoor or green house; dispatched across Japan; unstable salaries; rural workplace	Indoor; stable and better salaries; urban, suburban, or regional workplace
Number of registered SSW workers	Registrants: 23,861; quota: 36,500; expanded entry	Registrants: 61,095; quota: 34,000; constrained entry
Skill test requirements on entry	Ample locations and times; test language: workers’ native language	Limited locations and times; predetermined registration windows; limits on applicants; test language: Japanese
Common precarities	Risk of losing status and lodging if unemployed; difficulties of identifying and changing employers; dependent on employers and brokers for documentation; lack of knowledge

Note. SSW = Specified Skilled Worker.

To sum up, 5 years after implementation, substantial discrepancies have arisen between the intentions of the SSW and the outcomes of its implementation as Table 3 illustrates.

Table 3.

Discrepancies Between Policy Intentions and Outcomes.

Intentions	Outcomes
Abolish broker control over mobility	Broker and employer control persists
Allow employer change to relieve precarity	Difficult to change employers; less legal protection; precarious
Attract and retain labor to meet labor demand (overall quota: 345,000)	Only 208,425 registrants; inadequate to meet labor demand
Balance workers among industries; set industry-specific quota	Imbalance of labor among industries: overconcentration in industries with relatively good conditions (e.g., food industry), but sparseness in industries with poor conditions (e.g., agriculture)

Discussion

To address labor shortages and motivate interns to continue working in Japan, the SSW program offers interns expanded freedom and rights. Between intern status and SSW-1, the most significant difference is the conditional freedom to change employers. Nevertheless, the industries open to the SSW program overlap significantly with those in the TITP, which are all 3D sectors. Therefore, migrant workers are still trapped in labor-intensive 3D sectors, within which employer change is allowed. Moreover, my fieldwork demonstrates the difficulties of obtaining such a freedom on the ground. The TITP has set up restrictive broker and employer control over labor mobility. Although the SSW program attempts to abolish broker control and permit employer change, workers are still at the mercy of the original employers and brokers. Brokers’ interests are impaired by new forms of job mobility and thus push back policy reform (e.g., by withholding required documents for employer change). Accordingly, I argue that once in place, the privatization of labor governance persists as it becomes integral to the governance structure and difficult to eliminate. When seeking to change employers across industries, SSW-1 workers encounter obstacles set by ministries to avoid their overconcentration in certain industries (such as the food industry) and sparseness in others (such as agriculture). However, the measures could not prevent labor imbalance across industries. Moreover, without adequate legal protections and regulations on brokers, SSW workers may face more precarious conditions than interns.

Consequently, due to the hurdles to employer change and precarious situations, the SSW program did not attract adequate workers to meet labor demand. Similar discrepancies between policy intentions and implementation outcomes are likely to occur in the upcoming reform of the TITP. In February 2024, the government announced its plan to abolish the TITP and replace it with the Work Training System (WTS), under which workers would be allowed to change employers within the same field after one or two years (Fuji News Network 2024). However, the proposed system offers only modest improvements on the 3-year threshold to change employers under the TITP, and appears to do little to address workers’ precarity (Holbrow and Rosenberg 2024). Moreover, as this article's evidence suggests, the difficulties that workers encounter in changing employers are sufficient to question whether participants in the WTS can truly change employers.

The implementation outcomes of both the SSW and the upcoming WTS may curtail Japan's competitiveness in attracting and retaining migrant workers in the long run. The era in which developed East Asian states select blue-collar migrant workers in a top-down manner is nearing an end. Workers have begun choosing destination states in a comparative manner across Asia and beyond. In this context, Japan is falling behind competing nations. Vietnamese workers in South Korea could earn an average of $1,400–$1,800 per month, while in Japan they earn $1,200–$1,400 (Chieu 2022). Moreover, since 2022, the depreciation of the Japanese currency has led remittances to drop by as much as 25%, which has driven more workers to South Korea and Australia (Iwasaki 2023). In Taiwan and South Korea, the condition to qualify for permanent residence application is as short as five years, while in Japan the length is 10 years (Keidanren 2022). In addition to the external competition, Japan also faces internal pressure from employers in fields with dissatisfying conditions such as agriculture, who are struggling to attract and retain migrant workers, to meet labor demand.

Conclusion

In this article, I examine the design of Japan's SSW program. The program opens a channel for temporary migrant workers in the TITP to continue working in Japan by granting them freedom to change employers and other rights. However, such a freedom is conditional, with quite a few constraints, including complex documentation requirements and skill certificates. Consequently, workers continue to rely on brokers for documentation services although such a role of brokers is officially excluded in the migrant governance under the SSW. Some workers continue turning to humanitarian actors for assistance with disputes. Still, not many workers can overcome these obstacles, and most workers end up working for the same employers or are trapped in an undesirable industry.

This article updates our understanding of how labor mobility governance is shifted from private to public and the outcomes of such a shift, an issue that is underexplored in migrant-receiving contexts. As the Japanese case shows, when migrant workers are allowed to change employers, the role of broker control in the guest worker program becomes unnecessary and thus abolished; instead, governmental institutions manage mobility governance. However, on the ground, brokers resist policy changes as the freedom to change employer conflicts with brokers’ interests. Hence, they withhold required documents for employer change and status updating. To overcome the documentation obstacles, workers have to turn to other brokerage agencies for service, but no regulations are in place to monitor them. As a result, workers remain vulnerable to brokers’ control and potential deception.

Finally, population ageing and low birth rates are advancing worldwide, not only in East Asia. According to the United Nations (2020), “half of global population growth between now and 2050 is expected to come from just nine countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt and the United States of America.” It is likely that an increasing number of countries will respond by liberalizing immigration policies to compete for and retain low-skilled and semiskilled migrant workers. However, as this article and others have demonstrated in varied contexts, liberal reform itself is far from adequate to substantially transform guest worker programs (Bryan 2019; Garrett 2020).

Three common challenges are on the way. First, liberal reforms require receiving states to expand labor rights, particularly workers’ ability to change employers, while guest worker programs are rooted in broker and employer control over labor mobility. To make employer change accessible on the ground, states encounter the challenge of how to effectively lift broker and employer control that has been built into guest worker programs. Second, liberal reforms bring about competition among employers in varied industrial and occupational sectors as migrant workers become free to choose employers. However, under guest worker programs, employers’ labor demand is met by depriving labor freedom, without the pressure to improve working conditions and compete with each other. This raises another challenge of how to meet employers’ labor demand in sectors that cannot provide competitive conditions (such as agriculture). Third, under guest worker programs, migrant workers are vulnerable to human rights and labor rights violations, and labor disputes at the hands of employers and brokers. To liberalize guest worker programs, states continue to face the challenge of how to effectively regulate brokers and employers to protect workers and alleviate their vulnerability.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

I thank the following professors for their helpful feedback on the previous versions of the article: Rubén Hernández-León,Roger Waldinger,Min Zhou,Hilary Holbrow,and Zhan Shaohua. I am also grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions from the anonymous reviewers and editors.

ORCID iD

Qiaoyan Li Rosenberg

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Sasakawa Graduate Fellowship by the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies,Fulbright — Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program (Grant No. P022A200006-006),UCLA Dissertation Year Award.

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

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Liberal Reform of Guest Worker Programs: Challenges to Labor Mobility Governance

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Dynamics of Labor Mobility Governance: Private Versus Public

Data and Methods

Structure of Mobility Governance: A Comparison Between TITP and SSW

Changing Employers Amid Transitioning from Intern to SSW-1

From Agriculture to the Food Industry (SSW-1 Workers)

Discussion

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

ORCID iD

Funding

References