Gender Struggles
Gender Struggles

Author: Christopher Gerteis

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1684174945

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"In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce and put in place measures to promote women’s active participation in union activities. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by their American occupiers; rather, they pressured thousands of women labor activists to assume supportive roles that privileged a male-centered social agenda. By the late 1950s, even Japan’s radical socialist unions had reestablished the primacy of conservative gender norms, channeling women’s labor activism to support political campaigns that advantaged a male-headed household and that relegated women’s wage-earning value to the periphery of the household economy. By showing how unions raised the wages of male workers in part by transforming working-class women into middle-class housewives, Christopher Gerteis demonstrates that organized labor’s discourse on womanhood not only undermined women’s status within the labor movement but also prevented unions from linking with the emerging woman-led, neighborhood-centered organizations that typified social movements in the 1960s—a misstep that contributed to the decline of the socialist labor movement in subsequent decades."

The Wages of Affluence
The Wages of Affluence

Author: Andrew Gordon

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2001-11-15

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780674037816

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Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Managerial hegemony was achieved only after a bitter struggle that undermined the democratic potential of postwar society. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel. This industry was at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth, a primary site of corporate managerial strategy and important labor union initiatives. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon traces worker activism and protest in the 1950s and '60s, and how they gave way to management victory in the 1960s and '70s. He shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He illuminates the Japanese system with frequent references to other capitalist nations whose workplaces assumed very different shape, and looks to Japan's future, rebutting hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image. Gordon argues that it is more likely that Japan will only modestly adjust the status quo that emerged through the turbulent postwar decades he chronicles here.

Disparaged Success
Disparaged Success

Author: Ikuo Kume

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 150173184X

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Japanese scholars have begun to challenge conventional wisdom about effective labor organizing, and Ikuo Kume has written the first book in English to advance their controversial theory. Since at least the early 1980s, the power of organized labor has weakened in most advanced industrial countries. The decline of organized labor has coincided with the decentralization of labor-management relations. As a result, most observers assume that decentralized labor is destined to lose power in a capitalist economy, and that enterprise unions will tend to be docile and powerless. Kume documents the one notable exception. The Japanese trade union confederation has steadily grown in importance, expanding its scope beyond individual companies to national policy making. Kume traces the achievements of enterprise unionism in private firms. Labor, he argues, slowly gained legitimate corporate membership by establishing joint institutions with management. By the 1960s, labor-management councils, stimulated by foreign competition, had become a widespread feature of Japanese industry. Soon unions were regular participants in the government deliberation councils and in the information exchange that shaped policy when inflation hit the Japanese economy. The unions had become a full partner by the 1980s and were crucially involved in the 1993 defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party after thirty-eight years of rule.

Gender Struggles
Gender Struggles

Author: Christopher Gerteis

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780674035690

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Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Women and Unions in Occupied Japan -- The Erotic and the Vulgar -- Wage Struggles and Struggle Politics -- Teachers and Coal Wives -- Family Unions -- Federation Wives -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index -- Harvard East Asian Monographs.

Japan Works
Japan Works

Author: John Price

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1501732110

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The postwar miracle, says John Price, made Japan and its corporations the toast of the global village, with scholars across the United States pointing to Japan as the model for future enterprise. The economic bubble burst, however, in 1989, and Price documents difficulties that have surfaced since that time. In Japan itself, the common self-assessment is "rich country, poor people" and government reports regularly criticize society for being too enterprising. In emulating Japan, Price asks, are we choosing a path Japan itself is rejecting?Price probes the paradoxes in postwar labor-management relations, particularly in the years between 1945 and 1975. Basing his analysis on the history of labor in Mitsui's Miike mine in Kyushu, Suzuki Motors in Hamamatsu, and Moriguchi City Hall, the author questions the common interpretation that industrial relations are based on lifetime jobs, seniority-based wages, and enterprise unions. He also asks whether Japanese workers have been genuinely empowered by the developments in recent years. In his description of the rough-and-tumble world of postwar Japanese industrial relations, Price pays particular attention to the Occupation period, the rise of Shunto, the increased industrial conflict prior to 1975, and the transition to generalized labor-management cooperation. Relying on French regulation theory and on Michael Burawoy's concept of production regimes, Price suggests a revisionist interpretation of the transformation of Japan's political economy, offering new insights into the rise of lean production and the quality movement in Japan.

The Human Face Of Industrial Conflict In Post-War Japan
The Human Face Of Industrial Conflict In Post-War Japan

Author: Hirosuke Kawanishi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-09

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1136884378

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First Published in 1998. This volume first appeared in Japanese as Sengo Nihon no Sõgi to Ningen (1986). Published by Nihon Hyõronsha in Tokyo it included the reflections of nine union leaders who had taken their unions through some of Japan's most important post-war industrial disputes. In 1983 each of the leaders came to a student seminar at Chiba University near Tokyo. The talks were recorded and then transcribed with two aims in mind. One was to provide information on the events which led to the formation of Japan's industrial relations as we know them today. During the 1950s and early 1960s a number of Japan's key labour unions lost a succession of campaigns to establish and to defend what they saw as the natural rights of their members. Many of the unions experienced schisms, and the end result was a fundamental shift in the balance of power between labour and management.