The Chinese company Timee, which was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in July, held its second income call on September 12. CEO Ryo Ogawa lauded the company’s growth, headlined by 72.6 % and 60.6 % YoY rises in sales revenue and gross profit, respectively.
Highlighting the product’s 1.2 million and growing account, Ogawa touted potential partnerships with remote regions and market associations, ranging from restaurants to security guard providers, as a way to ultimately resolve Japan’s growing labor shortage.
Traders, however, are extremely wary. After the IPO, Timee’s stock price increased by up to 28 %, and it has since steadily fallen nearly 40 % below the IPO price.
Analysts blamed the decrease on the possibility that Timee will face stiff competition from larger, more well-resourced web giants like Mercuri if they start to expand their business and quickly poach Timee’s clientele rather than blaming its fundamentals.
In other words, the success of Timee’s business concept may be its very fate.
Fall of the precariat
However, Timee’s accomplishment speaks to some remarkable changes in the Japanese labour markets. While “irregular employment”, including part-time, contract and freelance workers, represented less than 15 % of the Japanese labor force in 1985, the figure soared to 37 % by 2023, numbering more than 21 million.
An estimated 7 to 10 million of these people work as gig workers, meaning they depend on a regular stream of small projects from various clients for survival rather than a steady job at a single employer. At the bottom of this job work population lies Timee’s workplace.
The platform attracts workers in desperate need of urgent income who are not constantly attainable by offering work that does not require an interview, no background check, and immediate pay upon gig completion.
The worker may be given little-paying, basic, repeated work that necessitates much thought and does not allow for many long-term professional development and learning due to the employer’s inability to evaluate the worker beforehand.  ,
The lower quality of such gig work is extremely leading to a population of “precariats” dependent on the jobs for survival, however, due to the inability to grow properly, are forever” stuck” in low-quality jobs.
The insecurity is obvious from Timee’s user base statistics. More than 60 % of Timee’s registered users are over the age of 30, 88 % earn less than 5 million Japanese yen ( US$ 33, 700 ) per year, and more than half are” core workers” using the platform at least eight times per month.
Timee has significantly evolved into a system for aging workers who, for whatever reason, have fallen short of the full-time career path in corporate Japan rather than serving youths looking for some spending cash outside of their study hours.  ,
Salaryman of the recent
To be clear, the development of a precarious social category of job personnel is by no means exclusive to Japan. The fall of an underclass job worker, however, clearly contradicts the accepted view of the Asian labor market, which restrains economic growth.  ,
After all, many candidates proposed loosening regulations to prevent the fire and hiring of ordinary employees during the late concluded elections for the decision Liberal Democratic Party’s president, perpetuating the prevalence of the “one-company salaryman” due to the sheer cost of job-hopping.
Analysts at both Japanese and international think tanks attributed the country’s underwhelming productivity to the propensity for something close to lifelong employment as a root cause, according to experts in Japan and other countries.
A new reality is brought to light by Timee’s rise by its army of older gig workers: the Japanese labor market is becoming less and less competitive due to the rigidity of full-time formal employment.
The country’s inequality will continue to rise as more and more Japanese workers work outside of traditional jobs, accelerating a trend where the Gini coefficient increased by nearly 60 % in the last four decades until 2019. Timee and its potential rivals in the gig economy are poised to further exacerbate that gap.