Japanese labour unions feel pain of new era Membership has plummeted and once-powerful groups have lost clout as conservative governments oppose worker activism. Michael Penn Last Modified: 18 Feb 2013 12:02 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/02/201321713641911842.html
.Only 18 percent of Japanese are in labour unions now, compared to 55 percent in the 1950s [Michael Penn/Al Jazeera] Tokyo, Japan – The “spring offensive” used to strike fear into the hearts of Japan’s industrial managers.
.Labour union demands for wage increases were boldly submitted. To underline their steely determination, workers walked off the job in the spring. Trains were halted, leaving millions of commuters stranded and angry. The world watched to see how many days or weeks it would take Japanese business leaders to fold and to agree to wage hikes large enough to satisfy the labour union negotiators. But that was the character of Japan from the 1950s to ’70s – the high-growth era in which this East Asian nation rose from the ashes of a bitter wartime defeat to eventually reach the heady status of the number-two economic power in the world. „In the 1970s, there were almost 6,000 strikes on an average year, but last year there were only 68.“ – Motoaki Nakaoka, National Trade Union Council Even before that earlier period ended, shunto, the Japanese term for “spring offensive”, had become more of a ritual than anything else, and union militancy faded perceptibly as the years went by. Today it is practically unknown. “In the 1970s, there were almost 6,000 strikes on an average year, but last year there were only 68,” Motoaki Nakaoka, general secretary of the National Trade Union Council (Zenrokyo), points out. “This is an era in which even the labour leaders don’t know what it is like to prevail in a strike.” Union survival It is not only Japanese labour activism whose effectiveness is in question, but the very existence of Japanese labour unions themselves. According to a comprehensive survey carried out by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, the proportion of Japanese workers who are members of labour unions has fallen to 17.9 percent. At its peak in the early postwar years, that figure was above 55 percent. Many factors contributed to this steady decline in the power of labour organisation in Japan, and it’s a story familiar to many developed nations. For one thing, Japan’s conservative governments became less tolerant of labour activism and large-scale strikes as the years went by. Socialist and communist parties with which labour unions were affiliated either weakened substantially at the polls, or else disappeared altogether. The Japan Socialist Party serves as a particularly striking example. In the 1990 general elections the party won 136 seats in the House of Representatives. Now called the Social Democratic Party, it gained only two seats in last December’s general election and is on the verge of losing its legal qualification as a full-fledged political party. Both a cause and a symptom of the decline in big labour’s power is the increase in the number of irregular workers in the national economy as compared to regular employees – those who still benefit from Japan’s famous lifetime employment system. A larger number of Japanese, especially women, work as part-timers, dispatched workers, and contract workers; in other words, people who serve their companies for lower wages on an hourly basis and with fewer leg