This year's 10-day Golden Week holiday presents a good opportunity for company workers to try their hand at side jobs.
More companies have recently been allowing their employees to take side jobs, and accommodation facilities and certain other businesses are expected to face larger staff shortages than usual during the upcoming holiday. As a result, many business operators will likely be searching for people who can work second jobs.
On Monday evening, about 30 people attended a seminar in Tokyo mainly for company employees interested in taking side jobs. The event was called "The 10-day Golden Week holiday is a good time to make money, not to have fun." A lecturer introduced specific examples of side jobs, such as working as a sketch artist.
"The upcoming Golden Week holiday will be a good opportunity for more people to become interested in side jobs," said an official of CrowdWorks Inc., a side job placement company that helped host the event.
A 35-year-old male office worker from Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, who is considering a side job, said, "A second job requires you to make consistent efforts every day, so I want to map out my plans during the holiday period."
In mid-April, a Tokyo staffing agency began looking for people to install computers at a medical facility in the Kanto region over three days during Golden Week.
Within a few days, the agency received enough applications to fill the 90-person job. Two-thirds of the hires have main jobs as company workers and took the gig as a secondary form of employment, according to the agency.
The accommodation industry is also facing a staff shortage during the 10-day holiday period, particularly in regional areas.
Hotel Saginoyu, a long-established inn in Suwa, Nagano Prefecture, sees Golden Week as an opportunity to hire people that work other jobs. Finding it difficult to get all of its full-time staff to work during the holiday period, the inn decided to post the job online with the phrase "People working side jobs are welcome."
"I think the types of work needed at inns are suitable to side jobs," said Yoshiro Ito, chief operating officer in charge of job recruitment for the inn.
In January 2018, the government shifted to a policy of supporting side and second jobs as a work style. It deleted a clause prohibiting workers from taking side and second jobs in the Model Rules of Employment, which the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry releases for companies to use as a reference.
According to Mizuho Research Institute Ltd., about 2.7 million people have side jobs in Japan, accounting for only 4 percent of the entire workforce. However, about 22 million people are estimated to either want a side job or consider taking one in the future.
Meanwhile, 38.9 percent of male workers and 34.3 percent of female workers said they either "want to take a side job" or "already have a side job and want more opportunities and time for it," in a survey of 12,000 workers released last November by the Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training.
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