The Entrepreneur of the Self Has No Union: Subjectivity and Disengagement Among Young Workers in Italy and Japan

Young people in Italy and Japan face increasingly precarious working conditions, yet union membership among them keeps falling. Drawing on a mixed-methods dataset of 206 young workers (92 in Italy, 114 in Japan) that combines a structured questionnaire with open-ended interviews, this study asks why. Stress is common in both countries (64.6% of respondents rate their work as highly stressful, 77.2% in Italy against 54.4% in Japan), and perceived economic insecurity diverges sharply: roughly half of the Italian respondents report a high risk of precariousness and impoverishment, against about one in six in Japan. Despite very different union traditions — Italy's ideologically-based confederations and Japan's enterprise unions — the qualitative material points to similar patterns across both countries. Unions are largely absent from how young workers talk about their daily working lives. Workplace problems are internalized as personal failure rather than collective issues. Silence becomes a survival strategy. Reading Marcuse, Ehrenberg, Han, Touraine and Foucault as complementary rather than interchangeable, the article interprets these patterns as expressions of a deeper shift: the rise of the "entrepreneur of the self," for whom career is a solo project and struggle is a personal fault. The discussion also flags where this reading is less secure, and concludes by considering what new forms of solidarity might look like, grounded in the small acts of resistance young people already practice.