Labour Market Mechanism for the General Public is Universal, Applying Also to Politicians but More Severely?

Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - Osaka, Japan

From “physical move” of people as the result of the general election it seems that labour market mechanism applies to the political world. The collapse of the long year rule under one leading party forced many people go out of work, just like the collapse of world economy led to plunge in labour market and made many people jobless.

The transfer of political power from the LDP to the DPJ is making physical move of space and people in political world. BOJ Gov (Bank of Japan Governor) and government officials are visiting the DPJ instead of the LDP. The LDP is to give over to the DPJ their meeting room symbolizing the political power. The defeated LDP politicians have closed their election campaign offices and are now busily moving out of their offices and public dormitory for Diet members.

The defeated LDP politicians now are out of work in theory. To make their living, many of them may well become active in giving lectures, participating in panel discussion at conferences, making comments in TV programmes, and writing books, based on their long year experience and expertise in politics. But that is probably difficult for “Koizumi Children”, who became politicians in the last election held 4 years ago without sufficient preparation, and they probably would have hard time to switch their career again. That would be the case especially if they should had been easy in their political activities, and have not achieved tangible outcome and/nor have not learned something meaningful. It would be extremely difficulty for them to go back to occupation, position/role they used to engage in this tough economy after 4 year hiatus, especially in the current economic environment.

The defeated politicians are not the only people who have become jobless. Politicians usually have a number of secretary and staff. Many veteran LDP candidates that lost the election are said to had dozens of secretary and staff and they are laid off now. It really is like an employee working in a company suddenly is laid off for redundancy or for the company becoming bankrupt thus is automatically fired. What is more, it is said that there are two types of secretaries; one with some kind of indemnity and can gain some benefit when they are fired, and the other without such indemnity. If an employee is asked to leave the company as involuntarily retirement, he/she is usually provided with some kind of package including additional retirement benefits, but that is not the case for the latter secretaries, as it seems.

The labour market mechanism seems to be fully applicable to the political world, but in a much more and severe manner.