The socioeconomic factors that led to unemployment under COVID-19 pandemic among Japanese workers: a prospective cohort study

Objectives

To examine the relationship between socioeconomic factors and unemployment among workers during COVID-19 pandemic in Japan.

Design

A prospective cohort study, follow-up from December 22–25, 2020 through February 18–19, 2021.

Setting

The panelists registered with an Internet survey company

Participants

A cluster random sample of 33,087 workers with stratification by sex, job type, and region among Japan’s working population

Main outcomes and measures

Unemployment between December 2020 and February 2021

Results

Among the 19,941 participants, 725 (3.6%) had experienced unemployment. Multivariate analysis showed that the significant high unemployment for women (compared to men); younger age (compared to older age); being married (spouse not working), bereaved or divorced, and unmarried (compared to married (spouse working)); annual household income less than 6 million yen, (compared to more than 10 million yen); junior high or high school, vocational school, junior college, or technical school (compared to graduate school); and temporary or contract employees, self-employed, agriculture, forestry, or fishing (compared to general employees).

Conclusions

COVID-19 appears to have created difficulties for the vulnerable groups. This suggests the need for employment and economic support for such individuals.

Strengths and limitations of this study

Under the pandemic of COVID-19, we found that unemployment was associated with socioeconomic factors such as age, sex, marriage, income, education and occupation.

Our findings suggest that in the event of a major epidemic, resulting in unemployment among vulnerable segments of the labour market, regardless of whether workers themselves are infected.

It was unclear why the participants had experienced unemployment

This study was conducted as an Internet survey, so the generalizability of our results is limited.