What would it take to revolutionize Japan’s labour movement?

Japan’s largest trade union umbrella body, the Japan Trade Union Confederation, more commonly referred to as Rengo, elected a new leader on Thursday, 6 October (see Japan Times report, 7 October).

New president Tsuyoshi Takagi, from Japan’s largest union UI Zensen (a federation of over 800,000 members incorporating unions from the textile, chemical, food and service sectors) comes to power at a time when less than one in five Japanese workers are in a trade union (one in three workers were in a trade union in 1970). The continuing decline in trade union membership in Japan has come as an increasing number of workers are contract, part-time and female.

The world’s second largest economy once had one of the largest trade union movements in the world, which was a major component to the enormous and staggering growth of the Japanese economy from the 1960s through to the end of the 1980s.

Japan’s system of post-war development had very little to do with the North American model of capitalism. While much academic ink is still spilt over the phenomenon, few now seriously disagree with the work of writers such as Chalmers Johnson or Shigetu Tsuru, who argued in various ways that Japanese capitalist development was totally dependent on enormous state intervention and coordination between the large conglomorates (the former zaibatsu, restructured as supposedly annondyne keiretsu after the war).

What was central to the industrial relations structure of Japan during this time was an almost universal system of permanent employment for men, with automatic annual wage increases and a corporatist structure of labour-management relations (notably less transparent and formalised than the West German system of co-determination and works councils, but with deeper social roots). While there were (and are) non-corportatist trade unions (some part of the communist-affiliated union movement Zenroren, others independent), the overwhelming tendency was for union leaders to seek compromise with management. And it is the generation of union leaders who entered the workforce in the 1960s and 1970s who now lead Japan’s mainstream labour movement.

Much to the movement’s detriment.

The problem is that long before Japan’s unofficial princeling of ’reform’ (read neo-liberalism) came to power, the wonderfully coiffed prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, the economy had already restructured itself. While Japan’s financial sector no longer dominated the global banking world and Tokyo city blocks could no longer be valued using the GDP of mid-sized European countries as a yard-stick, the giants of industrial production and services (such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Sony and NTT) had moved vast chucks of their businesses off-shore. Even though Japan may have spent the last 15 years officially going nowhere (The Economist calls the period: "debt- and deflation-ridden stagnation"), those giants of industrial production have done rather well for themselves, domo arigato.

Toyota made US$10.9 billion in profits last year. NTT: US$6.6 billion. Honda: US$4.5 billion. Nissan: US$4.7 billion. Poor Sony only managed US$1.5 billion in profit.

The problem for unions in Japan is that these companies, which were the centres of trade union membership in the 1960s and 1970s are no longer the centres of employment in the Japanese economy. Yet, it is precisely "workers" from these companies that now dominate the trade union leadership of Rengo. Moreover, the companies themselves no longer have an interest in maintaining the corporatist relations of yesteryear, especially in the context of their increasing levels of transnationalisation.

This was most obvious in the recent case of a brutal police rampage against Honda workers in India who sought to protest the anti-union actions of factory management in the state of Haryana. To date workers remain missing from the violent and unprovoked police attack on a trade union demonstration. Japan’s ambassador to India commented that the actions of the Honda workers threatened foreign investment.

This is the contradiction which is at the heart of the labour movement in Japan. Japan’s leading companies have demonstrated repeatedly they no longer have an interest whatsoever in maintaining the industrial relations systems of the past (lest one think this some lost golden age, the system was built on rampant sexism and gender segregation). While this may be less explicitly stated in Japan, it is clear from these companies own actions as they pour investment into China (where it is impossible for workers to defend their class interests independent of state intervention), India (where violence against workers is routine) and other states in the region where collusion, harassment and union-busting are standard fare for industrial relations.

Yet, the leaders of most unions in Japan today speak of reviving the previous system or extending it to other countries. Let us for one moment take the suggestion seriously and ask: what would it take?

First, it would take an enormous increase in union power in Japan and the exercise of industrial action against those companies. Second, unions in Japan would have to devote resources not just to organising workers who are not members of unions in Japan, but they would have to devote significant resources to supporting unions organising in those areas where Japanese companies now operate overseas. Third, unions in Japan would require thorough change away from the highly centralised top-down structures at present to enterprise and shop-floor led structures (something the democratic wing of the labour movement in Korea has struggled with over the last two decades).

If those changes occurred it might offer the possibility of renewal. So what of Rengo’s new president; is he one to offer a new path for labour in Japan?

Sadly, no. For Brother Takagi (he would most certainly recoil if addressed as comrade) is from that wing of the labour movement whose utter being is devoted to the path of compromise and collusion. If union leaders in Japan continue to elect those who represent nothing new, there is little hope to be seen in Rengo and whatever deckchair rearranging is currently underway.

Where there will be hope will be the coming confrontation over the orgy of privatisation to be associated with the dismembering of the assets of Japan Post. This will make the 1990s in Russia seem like a playground.

Japan has a tradition of militant struggles which have been progressive, democratic and anti-fascist. Such struggles may well re-emerge in the wake of the continuing failure of the official union leadership to build a labour movement which can confront and redress corporate power in Japan.