Japan’s ‘Lifetime’
Job Security Under Attack
How Zenroren, UE's
Japanese Sister Union
Is Taking on Job Losses and Corporate Restructuring
By ROBIN ALEXANDER
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Demonstration organized by Zenroren
in front of the Nissan headquarters in downtown Tokyo. UE’s Alexander is in
the center.
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Japan’s "lifetime" job security system is under
attack — and Zenroren, UE’s sister union, is taking a leading role in the
fight against corporate restructuring.
On Oct. 19, Nissan announced that three plants would be closed
and 21,000 jobs eliminated. The announcement was made by Carlo Ghosn, of
Renault, which had taken over Japan’s second largest car maker last June. On
Oct. 27, Mitsubishi Motors Corp. announced plans to reduce its workforce by
12,400, and a few days later Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced cuts of an
additional 7,000 workers.
These and other massive cuts by other Japanese corporations are a
response to the Industrial Recovery law. Enacted by the Japanese Diet (the
national legislature) during its previous session, the law provides companies
with incentives to restructure through loans and tax breaks. In order to
qualify, beginning in October 1999, companies had to submit plans to the
government showing cutbacks in employment and productive equipment designed to
deal with overcapacity and lack of competitiveness.
(Ironically, the law also provides payments to companies which
hire workers — a response to the political charge that the law encouraged
discharges. However, newspaper reports failed to reveal any major hiring
plans.)
This is only the latest attack on a system which, for years, has
accorded the vast majority of workers at large corporations job security for
life. It is important to note that this setup was maintained at the expense of
temporary workers whose hiring and firing tempered the fluctuations in demand for production.
But under Japanese law even those workers had certain rights,
including the right to an employment contract.
‘LABOR FLEXIBILITY’
But Japanese labor laws have recently been amended to give
management greater flexibility.
For example, the law now permits the hiring of workers through
temp agencies in a far greater range of jobs. Similarly, protections accorded
women are being removed, to the distress of the more progressive labor and
women’s organizations which fear greater exploitation of women rather than
greater equality.
Both workers and labor lawyers spoke of trends to hire short
term or temporary workers rather than permanent workers, part-time rather than
full-time workers, and of increased outsourcing. Perhaps most frightening to
Japanese workers is the rapid collapse of seniority-based pay scales. In the
past, workers were accustomed to work less hard as they got older and to
receive better pay. Now, older workers are often the primary targets of
downsizing, forced into early retirement by pressure from management or faced
with the option of retiring or moving to a job far from their families and
homes.
Suicides have increased 71 percent since last year, we were
told.
Job loss hit the financial sector when the Japanese economic
bubble burst. We saw this up close when we joined workers from the Nakadachi
Securities Company in one of their continuous protests outside the Osaka stock
exchange. A stock exchange subcontractor, the company had been shut down last
May when the stock exchange withdrew work. Of the 142 workers who were fired,
about one third have filed suit with the Osaka District Labor Board demanding
that the company rehire them and negotiate with the union. As an added
incentive, the workers are occupying the company’s offices. Only half of
these workers were union members before their company closed; now they are
committed activists.
UNION RESPONSES
The workers we met with are members of unions affiliated with
the National Confederation of Trade Unions (Zenroren), formed some ten years
ago as a militant alternative to company trade unionism. Zenroren now
represents some 1.5 million members in affiliates throughout Japan. The
difference in perspective is striking. Due to a merger, Zenroren represents
approximately 45 of the many thousands of Nissan workers. Yet it was Zenroren
which launched a public protest to the announcement that 21,000 jobs were to
be lost; there was a deafening silence from the auto workers’ union and its
federation, Rengo.
On the opening day of the new Diet session, Zenroren organized
a protest march which included some 300 workers from various unions, together
with representatives from organizations of women, farmers and others. With brightly colored banners and chants, we marched from a
nearby park to the area of the Diet.
A rally outside Nissan’s headquarters in Tokyo gave me the
opportunity to speak to a member of the Nissan local’s executive board on
behalf of the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT). The FAT has organized one of
Nissan’s subcontractors in Mexico. The company fired some 200 workers and
threatened the labor board with withdrawing investment, so that the board has
refused to do anything for more than a year. In a letter to Zenroren, the FAT
asked if there was anything the Japanese union could do to help force the
company to comply with the law.
The Nissan worker said that although the situation their union
was facing was grim (his plant is among those slated to close), he had great
sympathy for the workers in Mexico and believed strongly in international
solidarity. The union would do what it could!
BROAD VISION
The same broad vision is evident in Zenroren’s work in
fighting restructuring. Zenroren unions frame plant-closing struggles in terms
of the injury to the entire community, and attempt to involve all parts of
the community and local government. They also make a point of speaking to all
of the workers in the plant, their members, members of another union, or
non-union (Japan has a system where more than one union may represent workers
within the same bargaining unit), to try to convince them to work in a united
manner.
They have established committees of unemployed workers which
they call "job hunters’ networks," to assist workers in finding
jobs, to bring people together to pursue hobbies and to fight for their
rights. For example, together with students and teachers’ unions they seek
to ensure that there will be jobs for high school graduates. They also fight
to ensure that the local governments make effective use of the money which is
provided by the federal government for measures related to the unemployed, by
surveying affected workers and making proposals based on the information they
obtain. And Zenroren itself is busy putting the finishing touches on
legislation designed to protect workers from restructuring.
In a discussion following the National Conference on Job
Security and Against Restructuring and Unemployment, Kanemichi Kumagai, a vice
president and former general secretary of Zenroren observed: "All of the
thirty-five people who spoke about restructuring also spoke of struggle.
Although we do not always win, among the most important lessons we can draw
from the successful struggles is that they involve the unity of all
workers."
(Robin Alexander, UE director of international labor affairs,
traveled to Japan last fall as part of a four-person delegation from the
National Lawyers Guild. Invited by several progressive Japanese lawyers’
associations, the Americans participated in seminars in several Japanese
cities discussing the impact of globalization on employment and labor rights,
criminal justice, and the foreign policy and increased use of military force
by the United States and NATO. She also spent several days with Zenroren, and
was a major speaker at Zenroren’s National Conference on
Job
Security and Against Restructuring and Unemployment.)
UE News - 01/00
