人材派遣ビジネスの地域的展開

The staffing industry has been rapidly growing in Japan during the period of economic recession after the collapse of the 'babble economy'. Most of companies concentrated their management resources into core activities and their peripheral operations tended to be reduced including contract out to outsider. They have introduced temporal workers instead of permanent employees to cut labor costs and to meet unstable fluctuation of workforce demand. Therefore, the number of temporal workers in Japan reached 2.1 million in 2002, which was four times bigger than that of 1990. Deregulation of Worker Dispatch Law also accelerated the growth of labor market for temporal workers as well as the staffing industry. This paper aimed to clarify the location pattern of the staffing industry in Japan. Following results were obtained. 1) A business model of the staffing industry tends to seek 'scale' because of low profit rate per temporal worker. This type of business sends mostly female office operators to customers. Another model is to dedicate in highly specialized staffing markets, for example IT engineers, designers, announcers, etc. 2) Business offices of the staffing industry have concentrated on the three major metropolitan areas, namely Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. Especially Tokyo has so much demand for temporal workers that makes it the largest agglomeration of the industry. Regional centers, typically Sapporo, Sendai, Hiroshima and Fukuoka, also enjoy location of the industry because of their branch office economies. 3) In any metropolitan areas city centers provide best accessibility to customers' offices, so that location of the staffing industry remarkably concentrated on that place. 4) Large staffing companies allocated their business offices according to the hierarchical system of cities. In the initial stage, location of their offices was mostly confined to the three major cities and four regional centers, after that they established branch offices in prefecture capitals.