Japanese labor relations during the twentieth century (abridged)

Labor Research, Summer, 1990

Japanese labor relations in the twentieth century had been marked by sometimes violent confrontation between management and unions.

...there might have been a massive cultural shift on both sides of the Pacific during this century, as the Japanese experienced an "industrious revolution" and Americans abandoned their once proud work ethic...

In 1908, Kobayashi Sakutaro, supervisor of the Shibaura Engineering Works factory (forerunner of today's Toshiba) in Tokyo, vented his frustrations at Japanese workers in a series of magazine articles. Well-educated workers were uppity, he wrote, and did not know their place; when they were not promoted quickly, they quit and moved from factory to factory like nomads. The older workers were uneducated men, proud and unteachable, who relied only on past experiences: "teaching them anything is like trying to teach a cat to chant the nembutsu [a Buddhist prayer]." During a trip to the United States, Kobayashi found a useful foil for his hopeless Japanese employees. American workers, he reported, followed rules, came to work on time, never loafed, and everyday sought to double their output. "One cannot easily find such attitudes among Japanese," Kobayashi concluded. American workers were docile; "they carry out a job well after just one order ... and the job of a supervisor is easy.... In Japan things don't get done without constant instructions and the lot of a supervisor is difficult." Finally, the Americans saved the money they earned by diligent sweat. "There is no such idiotic saying as that of the Edo artisan: `never sleep overnight on your money.' Everyone, no matter what his income, works hard and tries to save."(n1)

The wonderful irony of Kobayashi's lament is the ease with which the reference to Japanese and Americans could be transposed and printed today in Time or Newsweek. Nobody would blink an eye. Better yet, we can cull from the pages of today's academic and popular American writing on Japan a similar, inverse chorus of lamentation and praise.(n2)

This irony suggests several interpretative possibilities. It may be that Kobayashi exaggerated either the diligence of American workers, the sloth and stubbornness of the Japanese, or both. It is equally possible that today's observers have simply reversed what might have been Kobayashi's biases and constructed their own descriptions of American and Japanese labor. Finally, it is conceivable that both Kobayashi and observers today are right. That is, there might have been a massive cultural shift on both sides of the Pacific during this century, as the Japanese experienced an "industrious revolution" and Americans abandoned their once proud work ethic.

I see... a very real transformation of labor-management relations in twentieth century Japan... that involved, in Japan at least, difficult negotiation between workers and managers of acceptable terms of participation in the workplace...

...a process in which management accepted and incorporated a significant portion of labor's demands for respect and security. At the same time, management vigilantly refused, usually with success, to accept workers' organizations that presented safety, security, equality, or participation as goals that were independent of productivity and profitability.

To be sure, abundant evidence corroborates Kobayashi's picture of discipline problems in large factories during Japan's early industrial era. From the 1860s through the early twentieth century, both Japanese and foreign observers commented on the workers' lax attitude toward punctuality, their "shockingly low" ability to save, and their jealous guarding of traditional holidays. Observers also reported on the Japanese version of "Blue Monday," the days after payday when workers spent wages on drink, gambling, and prostitutes and when attendance fell sharply.(n3) In addition, both observer accounts and surviving statistical evidence reveal that labor mobility was relatively high, which management and government sources interpreted as evidence of poor discipline and little worker commitment to industrial life.(n4)

Such behavior reflected the failure of managers to convince workers that their interests, whether financial or moral, would be served by consistent hard work on behalf of the enterprise. The best indication that we are dealing with an issue of legitimacy, and not one of inherent maladjustment to industrial society, lies in the abundant evidence that these same workers put in long hours, studied at night school, and gladly acquired new skills when they connected their efforts with self-advancement and gains for their families. Early labor movement publications record stories of determined efforts by skilled men to scrape together some capital and start up their own small workshops.(n5) Union activist Uchida Toshichi combined his daytime job in the Naval Arsenal in Tokyo with an evening apprenticeship at a small local foundry where he learned to make hibachis. "I somehow felt this hibachi work was a guarantee for the future," he wrote in his memoirs.(n6) Even Kobayashi Sakutaro offered an unguarded view of determined workers when he complained that Shibaura often lost contracts to "shrewd workers" who pulled up the floorboards of their homes, installed engines, and started their own businesses: "The products aren't that different from what can be produced at a factory with modern facilities, but large factories cannot take in work as cheaply as these places. While one admires their cleverness, on the other hand the prevalence of such makeshift production slows the progress of more modern enterprise."(n7)

The issue, then, was not whether Japan's workers were lazy as industrial capitalism came to Japan, but whether managers would be able to legitimate a claim that large capitalist enterprises deserved to receive diligent, sustained effort from their workers. Two initial observations can be offered here. First, over roughly 70 painstaking years of improvisation, contention, struggle, compromise, and renewed tensions, managers in Japan were able to stake such a claim. Second, at the heart of this attainment of legitimacy was a process in which management accepted and incorporated a significant portion of labor's demands for respect and security. At the same time, management vigilantly refused, usually with success, to accept workers' organizations that presented safety, security, equality, or participation as goals that were independent of productivity and profitability.

1)  workers in a wide range of factories demanded secure jobs and the social security of severance pay in cases where dismissals could not be prevented...

...severance pay and preferential rehiring of those fired...

2) secure, predictable, implicitly seniority-based wages...

...semi-annual, regular raises...

During World War I and the 1920s, workers in Japan -- both those organized into unions and some nonunion workers who initiated labor disputes -- raised vigorous demands for the treatment they required before offering a sustained commitment to their employers. The workers' program sought three major reforms, which will probably strike readers as universal demands of wageworkers rather than as peculiarly "Japanese" reforms.

First, workers in a wide range of factories demanded secure jobs and the social security of severance pay in cases where dismissals could not be prevented. Such demands were raised primarily in large heavy industrial sites during and just after World War I, but they were also pressed by men and women in smaller machine, metal, and chemical factories during the late 1920s and the depression. For example, the shipbuilders, who were among the most aggressive supporters of unions in early industrial Japan, initiated a dispute at the Yokohama Dock Company in the winter of 1922. The roughly 2,000 men at the shipyard threatened to strike in opposition to the dismissal of 260 men. They demanded that the men be rehired; and when it became clear that they would not prevail in a showdown, they retreated to demand severance pay and preferential rehiring of those fired.(n8) What is both noteworthy and typical of this case is that despite a forbidding economic climate of sharp post-war depression, with a work force swollen by wartime hiring and with few new orders on hand, the workers very nearly went on strike to protect these jobs. Even more noteworthy, in dozens of cases later in the decade when a company shut down an entire factory -- especially during the depression -- the dismissed workers would announce a "strike" and use a variety of imaginative and sometimes violent tactics to pressure managers to either re-open the factory or offer improved severance pay.(n9)

Second, pre-war workers called for secure, predictable, implicitly seniority-based wages. One aspect of this program for wage reform was an attack on output pay. In shipyards such as Yokohama or Ishikawajima and at engineering factories such as Shibaura, managers usually paid hourly or day wages combined with various incentive pay systems. Workers vigorously protested capricious unit price setting and price reductions in language familiar to historians of American or other movements: "The unit price is always changing.... They give prizes to the top producers and encourage competition to raise efficiency, which lets them lower unit prices. They always make the top output level into the standard and work to lower the unit price."(n10)

In addition, workers of the 1920s made the semi-annual "regular raise" into a labor movement cause. Beginning at about the turn of the century and increasing in frequency during World War I, managers in Japan had offered semiannual pay raises to favored workers to slow turnover and to retain particularly valuable people. Typically, raises were selective, with only a portion of the work force granted raises in a given semi-annum and with a considerable range in amount. In theory, the standards were diligence and skill; in fact, workers often saw favoritism. The irregularity and capriciousness of who received raises was a continual source of frustration and anger. When workers launched disputes for reform of the wage system or simply for higher wages, they would typically demand "regular raises," uniform in amount and granted to all who met minimum standards. Thus, workers at Shibaura in the 1920s grumbled:

It's been so long I've lost track of when the last pay raise was. This company is really cheap. After 2 or 3 years we get just about 5 or 6 sen a day as a raise. A worker who slaves and in one year cuts his life expectancy by 5 may get 10 sen, while the worker who runs errands for an executive's mistress gets 15 sen.(n11)

In November last year the Personnel Section ordered a survey of worker attendance and skill as preparation for a pay raise. Apparently we all got point ratings. Who gets good points? The worker who bows and scrapes to supervisors, who pretends to be hard at work when a boss comes by even when there's no work to be done. (n12)

In most cases, unions such as this group at Shibaura pressed without success for modification of both the unpopular incentive pay systems or for more regular "seniority raises."(n13)

The third element in the workers' program for reformed labor relations in pre-war Japan was the plea to be offered respect as human beings, as Japanese citizens, and as employees of the firm. This moral dimension to the labor program is discernible in the outrage expressed by the Shibaura men at favoritism shown to toadying workers. More generally, in addition to the bread-and-butter issues of job and wage security that had sparked labor actions during the pre-war decades, it was the perceived scorn felt by management toward labor, the lack of respect for the "humanity" of workers, and the refusal to consider them to be "full members" of the enterprise community that most offended workers and that helps account for the tentative nature of their commitment to the enterprise that men such as Kobayashi lamented.

Numerous disputes during the inter-war era derived their intensity as much from the moral outrage of men denied their "humanity" or full membership as from discontent over pay levels. Sometimes the demand for human dignity was combined with a political sense of mission, as "poor workers who produce everything for society" but get little in return or men who must unite for political action to "live as human beings."(n14) Demands for equality and dignity rang truest when they focused on concrete cases of offensive treatment, as at Shibaura in 1923:

Last year, the foremen used the same gate that we workers did, but, since we reflect poorly on the honored foremen's character [jinkaku], they all went crying to the company asking to be allowed to use the same entry as staff employees. The company pacified them with an entry separate from ours. Then, with the foremen no longer passing through our gate, the company began strict body checks of workers leaving work. The guards, on orders to be sure, happily carried out their obnoxious task without a second thought. They think we're all robbers.(n15)

... in response to the increasing power of unions and disputatious workers at major heavy industrial firms, managers created dozens of factory councils, which typically included equal numbers of management and worker representatives, the latter in many cases elected...

...they were usually advisory, and the company generally restricted their agendas...

...forums where workers and managers for the first time discussed matters such as work conditions, productivity, or safety

At the same time, however, Japan's industrial managers were not blinded to the pressure of the bottom line by such rhetoric of paternal care. To the contrary, statements such as this one were consistently balanced with both a hard-nosed insistence that management retain a free hand to deal with the work force as economic conditions warranted and a determined defense of managerial prerogatives against the intrusions of government bureaucrats (who promoted factory legislation or health insurance, for example).(n17) Thus, when the unionized workers at the Yokohama Dock Company tried to negotiate for increased severance pay for the 260 men dismissed in 1922, the company forthrightly denied any paternal duty to the employees: "While we sympathize with the difficult plight of the fired workers, we cannot take responsibility for their poverty. We have neither the obligation nor the capacity to raise the severance allowances or meet the other demands."(n18)

Similarly, managers stubbornly insisted that they must retain a free hand in setting wages in response to market conditions. At Uraga Dock Company in 1929, in response to a union's demand for regular semi-annual pay raises, the company invoked its paternal relationship with the men in the same breath as it spoke of the logic of the market:

Raises will be given only to workers whose present wage is judged to be low compared to their skill, and in other special cases. There will be no general pay raise in view of the present business situation, and we hope to gain your understanding, since you are different from other Kelhin-area workers and have a special relationship to the company.(n19)

Gradually, however, in response to both pressures from the labor movement and the labor market, a new rhetoric of equality and mutual respect crept into management pronouncements and policies toward workers. As early as 1921 at the Uraga Dock Company, managers changed the wording in pension fund regulations, which had "tended to make everything seem to be the benevolent gift of the company. Now all such paternalistic language is to be taken out of the regulations. For example, the term `to bestow' money is to be replaced by the term `to pay.'"(n20) More substantive were a variety of programs to slow turnover rates and co-opt the workers' expressed desire for respect. These programs, which first appeared in the labor-short boom of World War I, included small semi-annual bonuses, in- company training programs, and semi-annual raises for some workers. Finally, in response to the increasing power of unions and disputatious workers at major heavy industrial firms, managers created dozens of factory councils, which typically included equal numbers of management and worker representatives, the latter in many cases elected. Such councils were conceived most often as alternatives to recognizing unions; they were usually advisory, and the company generally restricted their agendas. Even so, the councils were forums where workers and managers for the first time discussed matters such as work conditions, productivity, or safety.

The result of these new policies -- which combined paternal rhetoric, hard-nosed union- busting, and some reform in the material treatment of labor -- was a new stability in labor-management relations in major enterprises and an acceptance by workers of the new status quo. By the time of the Great Depression, which hit Japan briefly but severely, strong unions had been ousted from most major worksites in heavy industry. Workers in the shipyards, arsenals, and metal and machine factories, which had seen dozens of disputes and strikes since the turn of the century, launched no major protests, even though their wages deteriorated and hundreds of employees were dismissed.

The situation was very different in other sectors of the economy. The textile industry predominantly employed women who tended to work for relatively short periods before marriage. These workers had not mounted sustained mass protests previously, and their managers, who had not seen the need to provide for discussions in factory councils, were shocked when a series of major disputes took place in which women took to the streets and demanded secure jobs and wages as well as decent food and the chance to live "human lives."(n21) Likewise, managers and owners of smaller firms, with work forces ranging from 30 to several hundred, were stunned to find their workers engaging in unprecedented numbers of disputes during the depression, often demanding the very reforms and benefits that had been extended to the relatively better treated men in large heavy industrial plants in the 1920s.(n22)

...newly imposed wage rules essentially required universal seniority pay raises for all employees, that raises be given twice a year, and that all workers be eligible...

...built a network of mandatory "councils of trust" set up in factories....

...Councils were to be composed of appointed management and worker representatives who were to meet regularly to discuss output, morale, and (at company discretion) working condition...

...scholars have seen this program as crucial to generating a system of harmonious labor-management relations purportedly typical of the post-war decades...

I take a different view...

...The Sanpo factory councils essentially developed into cheerleading squads that management never allowed to consider significant issues...

...Sanpo had a limited post-war impact...

...Councils-turned-company-union never attained broad support or legitimacy.

The military and the bureaucracy gained control of the political system and moved the nation inexorably toward full-scale war in the 1930s. It was in this context that the state bureaucracy took a much more activist role in social policy. Bureaucrats in the Welfare Ministry, with responsibility for labor policy, tried to systematize what they considered the customary yet unacceptably capricious management practices that had evolved by the 1920s. The period from the mid-1930s through the end of the war was a critical decade in systematizing and spreading some of the practices that are now considered typical of Japanese labor management.

Wartime labor policies were full of contradictions. Government bureaucrats claimed that in order to elicit productive effort from the nation's employees, the state had to set basic standards of fair wages and to promote social harmony between managers and workers. While they took some steps toward these ends, both the productivity of the economy and standards of living deteriorated dramatically during the war.(n23) Japanese workers experienced the war as a time of deprivation and coercion. Even so, a few of the wartime policies had an important influence on labor management practices.

The single most important wartime change forced on private sector managers by the government was the spread of regular, guaranteed seniority increments to all workers at a firm. Beginning in 1939 the government imposed a variety of wage controls. The first controls set limits on wages in order to control inflation. At the same time, the idea that the capriciousness of the existing pay system was a drag on worker morale and productivity gained support among Welfare Ministry bureaucrats. With the Ordinance on Labor Management in Essential Industries, they took a major step to redress this problem in February 1942. This regulation, issued by the Ministry without need of Diet approval under the authority of the National General Mobilization Act of 1938, first applied to a limited number of designated strategic factories. In 1943, the law was extended to cover all industries.

The ordinance required employers to compile written wage regulations, including rules for giving pay raises, and to submit them to the Welfare Ministry for approval. The Ministry actually collected rules from about 2,000 enterprises, inspected them, and rewrote them to conform to a model prepared by the bureaucrats themselves. This is a remarkably "clean," precisely documented example of the powerful impact that direct state intervention can have at the level of the individual firm. The newly imposed wage rules essentially required universal seniority pay raises for all employees, that raises be given twice a year, and that all workers be eligible. The only people to whom a company could deny a raise were those with records of excessive absenteeism, defined specifically as 30 days. Guidelines also specified the individual minima and maxima for the raises, which were to average 5 percent per year for a firm's entire work force.(n24)

The state had a much less significant impact in the realm of labor-management relations, worker organization, and participation. Bureaucrats and military men, with the wary cooperation of business leaders, created a system based on the Nazi model of a "labor front" and built a network of mandatory "councils of trust" set up in factories. The Industrial Patriotic Service Federation (Sangyo hokoku kai, or Sanpo) was the result. Sanpo began as a semi-official, non-compulsory organization, but by 1941 the government had mandated participation and all factories in the nation were required to set up Patriotic Discussion Councils. Councils were to be composed of appointed management and worker representatives who were to meet regularly to discuss output, morale, and (at company discretion) working conditions. Some scholars have seen this program as crucial to generating a system of harmonious labor-management relations purportedly typical of the post-war decades.(n25)

I take a different view. In contrast to the imposition of the universal regular raise, which systematized and extended a previously limited system and which was generally retained after the war despite the strong desires of managers to eliminate it, the Industrial Patriotic Association was successfully diluted during the war by managers suspicious of a state-imposed system of councils, even councils that would replace labor unions. The Sanpo factory councils essentially developed into cheerleading squads that management never allowed to consider significant issues. When asked about the importance of the Sanpo councils at his company, one participant in Toshiba's councils said: "That idiocy! We all slept through the meetings."(n26)

Sanpo had a limited post-war impact. Managers did try to nurture docile company unions in the immediate post-war weeks of autumn 1945, in the face of both the U.S. occupation force's encouragement of unions and the workers' energetic creation of radical and aggressive labor organizations. In almost all cases, workers in these early post-war days repudiated managerial efforts to revitalize or extend the life of Sanpo councils. Councils-turned-company-union never attained broad support or legitimacy. Of more relevance in offering cues or models to post-war managers who participated in the ubiquitous joint labor-management discussion councils was the example of the factory councils created during the 1920s. These groups were voluntary, worker representatives were sometimes elected, and the groups were subordinated to the goals of management, not the state.

Japan's workers took advantage of their newly granted rights to organize and strike during the early post-war years by joining unions in extraordinary numbers...

...these unions were able to win and to enforce what we may call the labor version of a so-called Japanese employment system...

• guaranteed jobs,
• guaranteed wages, and
• strong unions with
• some voice in influencing managerial decisions.

...strikes or threatened strikes...

...forced managers to retract proposals to dismiss thousands of workers, despite powerful business logic that favored the firings...

...managers (in the electric powe industry in 1946)...

...accepted a "lifecycle" or need-based formula for setting wages. In this settlement, the major portion of the wage was set in accord with objective worker characteristics that were assumed to reflect need, such as age, region, and family situation...

...More generally, Japan's blue-collar workers gained full "citizenship" in the enterprise and a measure of control over it...

...workers in 1946 demanded the creation of joint labor-management councils...

...They gave organized workers partial control of the workplace, personnel management, and corporate strategy...

...eliminated both petty and substantive status divisions between white collar staff and blue-collar workers, which had been so pervasive and repugnant to workers...

...did away with separate gates, dining halls, and toilets, as well as distinctions in dress and in terminology...

...virtually all managers opposed what they considered to be an intolerable loss of control....

...In the mainstream management view, the "evil egalitarianism" imposed by unions had destroyed legitimate and necessary managerial authority in setting the terms of participation in factory life...

...Showpiece confrontations...

...In a tactic that has since been replicated hundreds of times, the company refused to bargain with the existing "first union" or to renew its contract, while it simultaneously identified a core of cooperative workers willing to lead a "second union. "...

...companies refused to renew the earlier post-war contracts that had granted unions a decision-making voice on management councils...

...During the early 1950s, this management counter-offensive continued...

...The heart of the matter, however, was in union control not only of wages but also of promotions, the pace of work, and job assignments; in short, it was a fight to control the factory's shop floor...

...decade of hard-nosed union-busting marked the start of the second post-war reconstruction of labor relations...

...powerful new ideology of cooperation between company and union on behalf of the "enterprise society" was promoted by managers and accepted by the "second unions "...

...employees were to be members of a harmonious community, enthusiastic and respected participants in a common productive endeavor...

...second unions ceded to managers control of the shop floor (job assignments, transfer, introduction of new technology) in exchange for job security and a fair, negotiated share of a growing pie....

...So long as this bargain has been kept, workers have been willing to commit themselves to share their fate with that of the enterprise ...

Japan's workers took advantage of their newly granted rights to organize and strike during the early post-war years by joining unions in extraordinary numbers and making effective use of them to win dramatic gains in their social and economic status within the enterprise. Until the 1950s in most large private industrial firms and until the 1970s in the public sector, these unions were able to win and to enforce what we may call the labor version of a so-called Japanese employment system. At the heart of this system were guaranteed jobs, guaranteed wages, and strong unions with some voice in influencing managerial decisions. Virtually all of the demands raised in the unsuccessful push of the 1920s for reform of labor management practices were realized in this post-war labor offensive, and unions were able to go beyond this in many cases to enforce standards of job and wage security independently of the business goals of a firm.

Famous examples of the struggle for job security, which had a broad impact on practices throughout Japanese industry, included the strikes of the 1946 "October struggle" of the left-wing Sanbetsu labor federation. In particular, strikes or threatened strikes in the private sector at Toshiba and in the public sector at Japan National Railways forced managers to retract proposals to dismiss thousands of workers, despite powerful business logic that favored the firings. In September 1946, managers at JNR were forced to back down on a plan to dismiss 72,000 of its 540,000 employees when the union threatened a national railway strike. At Toshiba (formed in 1939 out of a merger of Kobayashi's Shibaura Engineering and Tokyo Electric Company) in the fall of 1946 the newly formed union carried out a 55-day strike that successfully prevented the company from even announcing the details of a plan to dismiss an undisclosed number of the 32,000 employees. A number of other private-sector firms won similar "no dismissal" pledges during the ensuing months.(n27)

The most important dispute to focus on wages, which brought into being a labor version of the predictable seniority wage system enforced by the government during the war, came in the electric power industry. Put on the defensive by a well-orchestrated series of union-led "brown-outs" directed primarily at industrial customers in the fall of 1946, managers in the industry accepted a "lifecycle" or need-based formula for setting wages. In this settlement, the major portion of the wage was set in accord with objective worker characteristics that were assumed to reflect need, such as age, region, and family situation. Companies retained even less discretion than they had under the wartime regulated wage system, as they were essentially unable to adjust wages based on a managerial judgment of an individual's skill or performance.(n28)

More generally, Japan's blue-collar workers gained full "citizenship" in the enterprise and a measure of control over it. Ironically, as they did so, the enterprise gained a new legitimacy as the focus of their committed labor. In companies as diverse and as prominent as the nation's leading newspapers and steel mills, workers in 1946 demanded the creation of joint labor-management councils. These councils, found in two-thirds of all unionized firms by mid-1946 (by which time over half of the work force was unionized) had significant power. They gave organized workers partial control of the workplace, personnel management, and corporate strategy. Through council deliberations or collective bargaining, workers eliminated both petty and substantive status divisions between white collar staff and blue-collar workers, which had been so pervasive and repugnant to workers throughout the pre-war era. Under union pressure, managers nationwide did away with separate gates, dining halls, and toilets, as well as distinctions in dress and in terminology (instead of workers and staff, everyone was called an employee). Workers also gained a new equality in the calculation of wages and bonuses. In most enterprises, a distinction between workers paid by the day and staff paid by the month gave way to common calculation in terms of monthly wages and payment of bonuses to all employees as multiples of this monthly amount. In this surge of post-war reform, there is a clear crystallization of practices that are considered to be defining features of Japan's post-war system of labor-management relations.

Most managers viewed the depth and breadth of this early post-war re-making of the labor relationship with dismay, if not horror. Men in the Keizai Doyukai, an organization of younger "reform capitalists" in leading firms, recognized the need to work together with organized labor to reconstruct the economy, but virtually all managers opposed what they considered to be an intolerable loss of control. In the mainstream management view, the "evil egalitarianism" imposed by unions had destroyed legitimate and necessary managerial authority in setting the terms of participation in factory life, and managers resolved to take back the initiative.(n29)

The chance to do so was not long in coming. Spurred by a sharply increasing concern to promote Japan's economic recovery and its emergence as a strategic ally, by 1948 and 1949 American occupation officials had come around to the consistently held view of conservative Japanese leaders that labor organizations were an excessively powerful impediment to "national" economic objectives. In this new political environment, a determined managerial counter-offensive began in 1949.

Showpiece confrontations came once again at Toshiba and the Japan National Railway. Toshiba managers were able to dismiss one-fifth of their 22,000 employees after a five-month dispute in late 1949. In a tactic that has since been replicated hundreds of times, the company refused to bargain with the existing "first union" or to renew its contract, while it simultaneously identified a core of cooperative workers willing to lead a "second union. " The latter repudiated the oppositional stance of the first union, accepted some dismissals, restrained its wage demands, and supported management efforts at "rationalization." At JNR, management was able to dismiss 100,000 workers in 1949 and 1950.

In hundreds of other disputes during those two years, companies refused to renew the earlier post-war contracts that had granted unions a decision-making voice on management councils. In the new contracts that were eventually concluded, most often with a new union, most councils were reduced to advisory bodies. In 1950, the Yoshida cabinet and private firms, with the backing of the occupation forces, carried out the sweeping "Red Purge" and dismissed well over 10,000 allegedly communist employees.

During the early 1950s, this management counter-offensive continued at companies like Nissan, where a strong union had essentially taken control of the shop floor. In the company's official history, the five-month strike of 1953 is portrayed as a triumph over a communist union. The heart of the matter, however, was in union control not only of wages but also of promotions, the pace of work, and job assignments; in short, it was a fight to control the factory's shop floor. The Nissan union, and auto industry unions in general, had not been particularly strong during the early post-war years. In 1949, the Nissan union had accepted the dismissal of 1,800 workers, 20 percent of the total work force. Then, Masuda Tetsuo, an energetic Nissan worker and union activist, provided a successful model for Sohyo's new strategy of "shopfloor struggle" by organizing powerful shop committees throughout the Nissan factory. These committees, consisting of one member per 10 workers, in workshops of 50 to 100 men, came to control overtime work assignments and employee transfers.

By 1953, Nissan had concluded that the union had "paralyzed staff functions" and had taken an intolerable degree of authority from management. With the support of Nikkeiren, the new national management federation, which feared that the Nissan committee system would spread, and with special loans from the government's Industrial Bank and the private Fuji Bank, Nissan welcomed a strike over wages as an opportunity to confront and destroy the union. The company succeeded. By late 1953, a second union led by white- collar men had led its members back to work, and the first union collapsed.(n30)

This process was replicated in numerous workplaces during the 1950s, but not in every one. At Japan National Railway, a strong union re-emerged toward the end of the decade. At Mitsui Corporation's Miike Coal Mine, workers gradually built a powerful union during the early 1950s. Its story is perhaps the most dramatic of any in post-war Japanese labor history. Building on a partially successful, two-month-long strike over wages in 1952, Miike's workers in 1953 were able to force managers to retract a plan to dismiss 1,815 miners with a 113-day strike. In this action, the Miike miners devised a three-part formula for union power: shop floor control, study groups, and community organizing of wives and local residents.

Activist shop committees were the locus of workplace control in this and several other instances during this era when workers formed combative unions. The unions also began to provide welfare benefits and personal care for its members, but most importantly, the union's shop or pit committees initiated a continual round of negotiations with worksite supervisors. During the years following the 1953 strike, the union codified these many improvements through the exchange of memoranda and provisional agreements and secured its position as defender of worker rights at the point of production.

Mine supervisors had customarily wielded great authority in setting output wages, assigning miners to rich or poor coal faces, or assigning men to lucrative double shifts. The heart of the union drive for control, one activist remembered, was the creation of a less arbitrary, more responsive hierarchy. Union pit committees sought and gained a voice in job allocations, output pay, overtime decisions, and, perhaps most important, safety. The deep and leak-prone Miike pits were notoriously unsafe. As the committees gained strength and experience, they would bring safety concerns to management's attention; typically, if concerns were not addressed immediately, the men at the site would stop work, carrying out what they called an "emergency exit."(n31)

Between 1953 and the great Miike strike of 1960, the union was able to end long- despised practices of favoritism and arbitrary authority; it reformed the work hierarchy and gave life to the union slogan of "democratization. " At Miike and a few other workplaces, unions that were determined to control work to foster workers' security, even at major cost to the corporation, had put down roots and would flourish for roughly a decade. Eventually, however, management would isolate, co-opt, or destroy these unions, in the Miike case after only a 10-month-long lockout and strike in 1960.

This decade of hard-nosed union-busting marked the start of the second post-war reconstruction of labor relations. A powerful new ideology of cooperation between company and union on behalf of the "enterprise society" was promoted by managers and accepted by the "second unions " that emerged out of most strike settlements: All employees were to be members of a harmonious community, enthusiastic and respected participants in a common productive endeavor. What is important here is that the earlier post-war gains of security and respect for workers were retained to an extent sufficient to endow the new labor relations with significant legitimacy in the eyes of most workers.

Although more research is needed to better understand the process by which management enhanced the legitimacy of its claim to the commitment of labor, it may be that experiments with entities such as Quality Control Circles during the 1960s and 1970s played an important role. Part of the "bargain" of the 1950s and after was that second unions ceded to managers control of the shop floor (job assignments, transfer, introduction of new technology) in exchange for job security and a fair, negotiated share of a growing pie. Beyond this, however, numerous companies showed real creativity in building on the notion, rooted in the practice of the early post-war era, that blue- collar workers were full members of the enterprise, and they involved these men in self- directed (though circumscribed) endeavors to improve morale and raise output. So long as this bargain has been kept, workers have been willing to commit themselves to share their fate with that of the enterprise by, for example, restraining wage demands to ensure the firm's long-run viability. To a large extent, the bargain seems to have held, although unions during the 15 years since the oil shock have lost most of their power to check or enforce the agreement.

...the rhetoric of respect and participation via circles has proved to be attractive to many workers....

... Central to the management-led reconstruction of the labor relationship after the 1950s was the retention, promotion, and even exaltation of this sense of responsibility in a new context where ultimate managerial authority had been secured...

...the Japanese case (establishment of the labor relations system)...

...a long painful process involving substantial tradeoffs and compromise...

Perhaps in the case of the pre-war councils -- and certainly with the cultivation of "second unions" -- the rhetoric of respect and participation via circles has proved to be attractive to many workers. By the 1970s, management was able to secure a legitimacy that surely was not present when Kobayashi spoke out in 1908 and was little present even by the 1930s. This was not a simple task. To a significant degree, "management as a separate entity in control of the work force" lost legitimacy during the early post-war years. Ironically, however, it appears that the "enterprise as the social possession of the workers" took on new importance. This meant, for example, that the Miike miners' union, even at the height of its bitter struggle with management, continued to send safety monitors into the mine to check for structural deterioration, even though there were no workers other than the monitors in the mine and no danger of injury as long as the monitors stayed out. This exercise of responsibility by the workers to protect "their" workplace considerably -- and perhaps mortally -- weakened the threat to management posed by the strike.(n32) Central to the management-led reconstruction of the labor relationship after the 1950s was the retention, promotion, and even exaltation of this sense of responsibility in a new context where ultimate managerial authority had been secured.

In closing, let me simply note two points. First, there was no quick fix in the Japanese case but a long painful process involving substantial tradeoffs and compromise. Second, as the process unfolded, laborers made independent use of their own organizations to articulate and, in some measure, to realize their vision of just or legitimate treatment. Only as they did so did the Japanese management system become so well-known in the United States that it gained legitimacy and, with legitimacy, gained the ability to convince workers to restrain wage demands or accept automation without protest.

NOTES

(n1) Taiheiyo sekai, November 15, 1908, p. 42; Jitsugyo shorten, September 3, 1908, pp. 7-9.

(n2) See Bruce Cumings, "High Technology and Ideology: America's Japan Mythology," Insurgent Sociologist (Spring 1983): 6-7.

(n3) Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1985), pp. 27-29. The comment on "shocking" savings rate is from the government report on factory conditions in 1902, Shokko jijo.

(n4) Ibid., pp. 33-35.

(n5) See the memoir of An Rui Sei (pseudonym) in Yuai shimpo, August 1, 1914, p. 4, August 15, 1914, p. 4.

(n6) Uchida Toshichi, Jinsei 50 yo nen (Kawasaki, 1961), p. 47.

(n7) Jitsugyo shorten, September 1, 1908, p. 9.

(n8) Gordon, Evolution, p. 146.

(n9) Andrew Gordon, "The Right to Work in Japan: Labor and the State in the Depression," Social Research 54 (Summer 1987): 253-63.

(n10) Shibaura rodo, June 7, 1932, p. 22.

(n11) Shibaura rodo, January 1923, p. 22.

(n12) Ibid., p. 10.

(n13) For a more detailed discussion, see Gordon, Evolution, pp. 164-90.

(n14) Shiboura rodo, December 1922, p. 7.

(n15) Shiboura rodo, June/July 1923, p. 9, by "A tool shop worker." The referent for the final "they" (the guards? the company?) is unclear in the original. For further discussion of the demand for respect for "character" (jiinkaku) of labor, see Thomas C. Smith, "The Right to Benevolence: Dignity and Japanese Workers," Comparative Studies in Society and History (October 1985): 606-608.

(n16) Tokyo Shibaura 65 nen shi, p. 48.

(n17) Andrew Cordon, "Business and the Corporate State: The Business Lobby and Bureaucrats on Labor, 1911-1941," in Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan's Prewar Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1989), pp. 55-62.

(n18) Kanagawa-ken, rodo-bu, rosei-ka, ea., Kanagawa-ken rodo undo shiryo (1966), p. 292.

(n19) Rodojidai, June 1929, p. 29.

(n20) Kyu kyochokai, "Uraga Dokku kabushiki gaishi shiryo," 1921 held at the Ohara Institute for Social Research.

(n21) Suzuki Yuko, Joko to rodo sogi (Renga shobo, 1989), is a recent history of one of the most famous of these disputes at the Toyo Muslin factory in Tokyo in 1930.

(n22) Andrew Cordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), chapters 8, 9.

(n23) On the economy, see Jerome B. Cohen, Japan's Economy in War and Reconstruction (1949; reprint, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973); on society and standards of living, see Thomas Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 93 passim.

(n24) For a more detailed account, see Cordon, Evolution, pp. 288-89. Kaneko Yoshio, "Chingin mondai no kako, genzai, mirai," in Kaneko, ea., Chingin: sono kako, genzai, mirai (Nihon rodo kyokai, 1972), p. 275, offers the recollection of one of the bureaucrats who carried out the policy. Kaneko provided the author a copy of the model set of wage rules compiled by the Ministry staff, which he used as he rewrote the company regulations: Koseisho, rodo kyoku, "Juyo igyojo romu kanri rei unyo hoshin," pp. 6, 44-45.

(n25) For example, see Magota Ryohei, "Senji rodo ron e no gimon," Nihon rodo kyokai zasshi, no. 75 (July 1965).

(n26) Hongo Takanobu, interview by the author, August 29, 1980. Hongo was a young manager in Toshiba's labor section during the war.

(n27) Toshiba, Kumiai shi, pp. 45-86; Kanagawa rodo undo shi, pp. 49-51, 54-55, 250-53.

(n28) Gordon, Evolution, pp. 351-55.

(n29) The term "evil egalitarianism" is a literal translation of aku- byodo, used, for example, by a former manager at the Yokohama Dock Company, Yasue Masao, in his interview with the author, May 19, 1980.

(n30) Michael Cusumano, The Japanese Automobile Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1985). Chapter 3 has the best English coverage of the 1953 strike. David Halberstam also presents a dramatic account in The Reckoning.

(n31) Kono Masayuki, Rodo mondai, October 1980, pp. 28-29; Uchityama, ibid., p. 89.

(n32) Yokoyama Fujio, "Sengo shuyo sutoraiki to Miike sogi," Rodo mondai, October 1980, pp. 66-67.

By ANDREW GORDON(*)

(*) Andrew Gordon is Professor of History at Duke University, Durham, NC 27706, and the author of The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan (1985).

Source: Journal of Labor Research, Summer90, Vol. 11 Issue 3, p239, 14p.
Item Number: 9609051653