Can Foreign Workers Save Aging Japan?
How the foreign workforce could help women shed their heavy domestic burdens and flourish in the working world
by IGNITION Staff
The Japanese government is currently discussing proposals that would loosen the restrictions on accepting foreign workers into the labor force and make it easier to employ foreign-born household workers, thereby allowing Japanese women to play more active roles in society. With the Japanese population starting to shrink, lawmakers are angling to get more women into the workforce by making domestic responsibilities less demanding. What is the world of non-Japanese household workers in Japan like? We decided to find out from Chez Vous Co., Ltd. CEO Kisun Yoo, whose company has been employing foreign workers ever since it got its start in Japan more than 10 years ago.
Chez Vous CEO Kisun Yoo tells his story
Before I started my company more than a decade ago, I worked at a foreign bank and made lots of connections with non-Japanese people. One of my co-founders was from outside Japan, too. That exposure to non-Japanese people made an impact on me, I guess; somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d always wanted to start a business that would make it easier for foreigners to live in Japan.
Once we got our housekeeping service going, I was amazed at how positive the response from our clients and staff members was. My job in finance basically boiled down to a money game, so I wasn’t really doing much to make the world a better place. It was more like we were making the world a more confusing and volatile place, actually — the financial sector was right in the middle of the Asian currency crisis at the time.
The idea of “social business” has become such a common concept these days that we hardly even mention it by name anymore, but that’s what I was going after back then: I wanted to create a business that would benefit the world.
Why I started a housekeeping service
I launched my housekeeping service business for three main reasons.
First of all, I wanted to do something with a human resource service. Knowing that women would be making their way into the workforce in greater and greater numbers, I figured that they’d be needing more help around the house. The “housekeeping service” idea only really took hold in Japan about seven or eight years ago. When I was getting ready to launch my business, though, “maids” were still the dominant conception in everyone’s mind — there was no such thing as a “housekeeping service.”
The second reason was that almost all the foreign colleagues I’d worked with at the bank had used housekeeping services to make their lives easier. Hiring a maid was just what people did. But since there were no Japanese companies providing services like that, my colleagues all had to find their own housekeeping help by themselves through personal connections and referrals. I knew that there would be a market for a housekeeping service that non-Japanese employees and expatriate personnel at foreign companies could take advantage of.
Finally, I wanted to give busy, high-earning Japanese people as much time as possible to spend on themselves, their work, and their private lives. The way I saw it, what they needed was the ability to outsource their housekeeping duties.
Basically, we built our service around three demographics: women, foreigners, and the upper class. We didn’t really have a detailed business plan for our housekeeping offerings when we started the company — as the co-founders and I bounced business ideas around, we eventually arrived at the service we now offer.
Filipino housekeepers
Roughly 40% of all the staff members on the Chez Vous roster are non-Japanese workers, with almost half of that international segment coming from the Philippines: we’ve got almost 250 housekeepers on our staff as a whole, and about 100 are Filipino.
It’s not that we haven’t tried to recruit people from other countries, though — Filipinos have simply turned out to be our biggest contingent. In addition to being able to converse in English with our non-Japanese clients, who represent the majority of our client base, housekeepers from the Philippines are also the best at housework.
A lot of my co-workers at the bank had housekeepers from the Philippines, so I’d heard about their stellar reputation before I launched the company. Given the rave reviews that Filipino housekeepers tend to bring in, they’re popular choices for all the segments of our client population — about 30% to 40% of our Japanese clients request Filipino housekeepers, in fact.
I don’t know exactly how the word gets around, but we’ve had plenty of clients ask specifically for Filipino housekeepers because of that sterling reputation.
The differences between Filipino housekeepers and workers from other countries are clear to me, too. They bring tremendous skills to the table, of course, but their attitude is another distinctive feature: Filipino workers are almost always positive, cheerful, and motivated to be great housekeepers.
Clients often talk about how having a Filipino housekeeper come to help brightens up their homes. I know that cultural background is a diverse, complex thing, but people from the Philippines strike me as professional, giving individuals — that strong willingness to help others might be part of their national character. Through their work as housekeepers, our Filipino staff members show a real sense of purpose and fulfillment in doing good for other people.
When it comes to their work abilities, Filipino housekeepers are extremely fast and organized. I didn’t know this until recently, but Filipino people — especially women — apparently start cleaning their rooms by themselves when they’re children.
The story of Linda, a Filipino maid
I was born and raised in the Philippines. I eventually met a Japanese man, got married to him, and moved to Japan, where I’ve lived for 29 years now. I started working as a housekeeper about eight years ago. I’d been a nurse in the Philippines, but I didn’t have a license to nurse in Japan — that’s why I took a housekeeping job. I normally work eight hours a day on weekdays, dividing my time among six clients in the Roppongi and Aoyama areas of Tokyo. I clean, do the laundry, iron clothes, and take care of pretty much any other around-the-house task that my clients need me to do. Almost all of the people I work for are diplomats or embassy employees from overseas.
After I finish cleaning, I always love seeing how happy and surprised the clients are when they see the results: sometimes, clients say that everything looks so clean that it’s like being in a completely different house. Some even tell me it’s like living in a hotel. When I see those smiling faces, I know that I have to keep on giving it my all and bringing joy into people’s lives.
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always liked to keep things neat and tidy. I’m such a stickler about it that my daughter is always telling me that the house doesn’t have to be that clean — “It’s not like we’re having people over today,” she reminds me.
I started helping my family cook and do the housework when I was about eight. My mom would give me and my siblings different jobs to do, and we’d all make sure that everything got done. When I was growing up, that was the way that Filipino families would bring up their children — and that background is probably why housework is something that so many Filipinos are good at and willing to do without any problem.
I had various jobs cleaning business hotels and doing other work before I got started with housekeeping, but now I know that what I do now is the perfect fit for me. All of the clients I’ve had so far have been amazingly kind and friendly, with some people even treating me like their very own sister. I’m so happy to be able to spend time with those kinds of people and see the smiles on my clients’ faces.
I love how clean and safe it is in Japan. Having spent a year in the United States, I’ve learned that life in other countries is a far cry from the peace of mind that we have here — I think I’d be too scared to go out at night anywhere else. For the sake of my children, too, I want to keep living and working as a housekeeper as long as I can in the safe, secure environment that Japan provides.
The housekeeping service boom outpaces the growth of the housekeeper workforce
Chez Vous doesn’t do much recruitment advertising for new housekeepers. Right now, the applications just keep pouring in on their own. We’ve been a part of the industry for about 10 years now, so we’ve got pretty decent name recognition in the Filipino community. If Filipino people start talking to their friends about maybe finding a job in housekeeping, someone will always recommend getting in touch with us. We get two or three new applications a day without ever doing any job advertising or posting job listings.
Almost all the Filipinos who work for Chez Vous are established residents of Japan — they’ve lived in the country for a long time and secured either permanent residency or long-term visas. Unfortunately, the current Japanese law forbids Japanese nationals from bringing housekeepers directly over from the Philippines to work in Japan. The only people that Japanese organizations can bring straight into Japan are resident foreign officers or foreign corporate executives, albeit under a litany of restrictions.
Chez Vous currently provides housekeeping services to over 1,000 clients, and the market is still growing at a rate of around 15% to 20% a year. At that pace, the value of the market — currently around 100 billion yen — will eventually surpass the 500-billion-yen mark.
The problem is that there just aren’t enough housekeepers to keep up with that growing demand.
No matter how great Filipino housekeepers might be at what they do, we’re still fighting a shortage of human resources: there’s always going to be a limit on the number of people we can hire, and we need to narrow down the applicant pool through training programs to ensure that our staff members can provide the quality we expect. If we get 50 applications, only about five of the applicants will make it through training to the interview stage — and we’ll only hire two or three of those finalists.
To determine if an applicant would make a good housekeeper, we look mainly at their etiquette, personality, family background, and experience — and also at whether they take a positive, serious approach to their tasks. Some people might be talkative, energetic people at first but slow and sluggish when on-the-job training starts; training might also reveal an applicant’s habits of cutting corners or someone’s general lack of motivation. The training stage gives us a clearer picture of those sorts of things, letting us identify the candidates best cut out for the job.
The Japanese government’s current plan to soften its regulations on foreign labor includes a provision that would relax the restrictions on bringing in domestic workers from overseas. If those new legal arrangements go into effect, certain local governments could potentially start making an active push to hire foreign-born household workers from the Philippines and other countries. We’re doing whatever we can do make that possibility a reality.
Enabling more Japanese women to venture into the working world
Encouraging Japanese women to make a bigger impact in the working world hinges on the availability of childcare, housekeeping, and nursing-care services, the last of which is particularly key as Japanese society grapples with a growing number of people having to quit their jobs due to nursing-care obligations. While the government pushes onward in its effort to have women in 30% of all management positions in Japan, many women in their 40s and 50s — the age range where they’d be most likely to secure high-level posts — have trouble concentrating on their work lives because they need to take care of their parents. Women face challenges in balancing their work with their childcare responsibilities, too: not only do many companies still fail to grasp the issues at hand, but there’s also a major lack of day-care centers and other facilities that working mothers can entrust with their children.
As the number of young people in Japan continues to fall at a faster and faster rate, observers are estimating that nursing-care responsibilities alone will create a labor shortage of around 1 million people by 2025. In fields like housekeeping services and nursing-care support, I hope we can use the experience we’ve gained to rejuvenate the Japanese labor market with the energy that foreign workers from the Philippines, other ASEAN countries, and nations across the globe offer.
(Photo: Ryosuke Iwamoto, Translation: Tom Kain)
Originally published at ignition.co.
