"The new staff recruitment campaign by FamilyMart is striking. Global megastars, however sincerely they worship your fried chicken tenders, do not come cheap: hiring Lady Gaga to dance for 30 seconds and ask "Why not work for FamilyMart?" marks a distinct new episode for corporate Japan.Superficially, the company's need to spend big and raise its game on recruitment is clear enough. But the timing is especially revealing.Japan, out of deflation and in labour deficit, now offers fewer cushions between companies and reality....In July, across all industries, the ratio of jobs-to-applicants was almost 1.2 times, while in parts of construction it was as high as 7.9....More and more companies, say advertising agencies and consultancies, are diverting larger slabs of budget into recruitment campaigns. They are doing so with a sense of urgency - not in a hunt for raw staffing numbers but for a suite of skills and a likelihood of loyalty that are in even more acute scarcity. Japan has a crisis of misallocation, say company HR departments....The Bank of Japan had begun […] a quarter-century experiment with ultra-low interest rates; companies, for their part, would spare the country mass unemployment by avoiding the most brutalising version of creative destruction [Moi ici: Recordar o esquema que se segue e as implicações que o dinheiro barato gera]
...Companies that might not have survived in another environment muddled through, delaying consolidation and favouring sprawl.…People who might otherwise have retrained and moved elsewhere stayed put, bloating the workforce in non-useful places....All of this was a recipe for a protracted, double misallocation of financial and human capital that has been exposed by two changes. The first has been the push for greater governance reform […]. But the most recent revision […] calls on companies to continuously review and explain allocation of resources, including human capital.The second major change has been the normalisation of monetary policy by the BoJ...the prospect of a higher cost of money is creating an expectation that capital allocation will, eventually, become a more existential activity...That should drive companies to become more active participants in job markets, in turn providing far greater social licence for people to change jobs and reskill for deployment where the economy needs them. […] corporate survival is no longer guaranteed."
O investimento numa celebridade revela que atrair trabalhadores passou a ser uma questão estratégica, num Japão envelhecido onde as empresas têm de disputar pessoas, competências e capacidade de aprendizagem. Segundo o artigo, a demografia é apenas parte da explicação. De acordo com o autor, décadas de dinheiro muito barato e de tolerância perante empresas pouco rentáveis permitiram preservar negócios que, noutras condições, teriam sido transformados, consolidados ou encerrados. Esse arranjo protegeu empregos, mas também manteve trabalhadores em actividades onde contribuíam pouco para o desempenho da economia.
A escassez de mão-de-obra, as reformas da governação empresarial e a subida do custo do dinheiro estão agora a reduzir essa protecção. As empresas terão de justificar melhor a utilização dos seus recursos e competir mais activamente por trabalhadores; estes poderão encontrar maior abertura para mudar de emprego e adquirir novas competências. A sobrevivência empresarial deixa de poder ser tomada como garantida.
Quando em Portugal as empresas se queixam da falta de trabalhadores e pedem paletes de mão de obra barata, estão na verdade a pedir ao Estado que as ajude a não terem de mudar.
Recordar "Tratados como Figos (Parte I)" e "A imigração torna-se então um substituto da estratégia"
Trechos retirados de "The Lady Gaga moment for corporate Japan" publicado no FT do primeiro de Outubro passado.
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