Personnel management of restricted-regular employees

This paper has two objectives. Firstly, it aims to shed light on the current personnel management approaches to “restricted-regular employment,” a form of employment about which a concern is raised in Japan. Secondly, using these insights, this paper will clarify the relationships between three forms of employment: regular employee, restricted-regular employee, and non-regular employee. “Restricted-regular employee” is the term used to describe regular employees who have limitations on their work location and tasks. In other words, they are regular employees with different characteristics to those of “typical regular employees,” workers employed under conventional Japanese-style employment practices, who have no limitations on their work location or tasks. The case studies introduced in this paper revealed that there are two main types of restricted-regular employee category: categories introduced for existing regular employees of the company, referred to in this paper as “restricted-regular employee (type 1),” and categories introduced for non-regular employees, referred to as “restricted-regular employee (type 2).” These types of categories are each utilized within companies in different ways. Employees in “restricted-regular employee (type 1)” categories are “limited-location regular employees” in the pure sense of the term, because, while their place of work is limited to a certain location, their tasks are flexible. As there is a tendency for the personnel and wage systems and career paths applied to them to overlap with those of “typical regular employees,” employees in “restricted-regular employee (type 1)” categories can be described as restricted-regular employees with similar characteristics to “typical regular employees.” On the other hand, employees in “restricted-regular employee (type 2)” categories have limitations on both their work location and tasks, and there tends to be few overlaps between their personnel and wage systems and career paths and those of “typical regular employees.”