Japan’s non-regular employees, which includes temporary workers, dispatch workers, contractors, part-time workers and others, totalled 20.71 million for the month of October 2021, down 1.9% over the year according to data from Statistics Japan.

The number of ‘dispatched workers from temporary labour agencies’ jumped by 6.7% over the year to a total of 1.44 million while the number of temporary workers overall decreased by 3.8% to 4.31 million.

Statistics Japan also published labour market data that showed the unemployment rate stood at 2.7% on a seasonally adjusted basis. This was a decrease of 0.1% when compared to the previous month.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the unemployment rate also stood at 2.7%, down from 3.1% last year but up from 2.4% in October 2019.

The labour force participation rate stood at 62.0%, down 0.4% compared to the previous year.

The number of employed persons in October totaled 66.59 million, down 0.5% compared to the previous year.

By sector, the information and communications sector saw the biggest increase in employment (9.9% over the year) while the accommodations, eating and drinking services sector reported a decline of 10.7% over the year.

Meanwhile, when it comes to job availability the jobs-to-applicants ratio was 1.15, meaning there were 115 job openings for every 100 jobseekers. This was down from 1.16 in the previous month.