Government plans for a 3 percent pay hike for carers are unlikely to attract many more workers.
“As a single female I can manage,” Furuno said. “But I think it would be hard for a man to support a family on this.”
In fact, contract workers laid off from the manufacturing sector are likely to find a familiar polarized job market in elderly care.
Those lucky enough to find permanent positions get reasonable pay and conditions, which encourage them to stay long-term, officials say. The 60 percent who work on a casual basis do not.
“I suppose it would be better to make everyone a permanent worker, but we simply can’t make ends meet that way,” said Kazuomi Shima, who heads Ikegami Chojuen, a social welfare organization that runs several elderly care facilities in Tokyo.
On a smaller scale, Japan is also trying to encourage the urban unemployed into jobs in agriculture, fisheries and forestry, where the workforce is aging rapidly, hampering government efforts to raise the proportion of food produced domestically.
But domestic media report a similar trend of low take-up and high turnover, with expectations dashed on both sides.
Schultz says there is room to retrain manufacturing workers, but that fields such as logistics for the service industry and equipment leasing would be more realistic.
“If you just try to kick young people in the city out to the country, that is as bad as putting disgruntled manufacturing workers at the bedsides of old people,” he said. “It isn’t working.”
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