Labour Relations During the Years of High Growth

The history of labor relations in postwar Japan has often been understood in a chronological framework that is too restricted, neglecting to place it in a longer time perspective going back before 1945. This has important consequences for the manner in which this history has been interpreted. The interpretation of labor relations during the high growth years is perhaps the most striking case. ¹ Thus, for instance, the 1960s, which opened with the failure of the strike at Miike, represent for many labor historians an important turning point in the sense that the 1960s sounded the death knell of militant unionism, which had been promoted in the aftermath of the 1945 defeat. The weakness of horizontal representation of the interests of labor, and especially the complacency of enterprise unions regarding some arbitrary practices by employers in particular, permitted a frantic pace of growth without concern for labor conditions, nor for the conditions of life of the population as a whole. More broadly, according to this reading of events, given the failure of the social movement made possible early on by the immediate postwar democratic reforms, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI’s) famous industrial policy lacked a social policy worthy of the name. For those presenting a ‘neo-corporatist’ understanding of the policies of the Japanese State after the war, the years of high growth thus marked the arrival of ‘corporatism without labour’. ² Indeed, there is no doubt that, especially considering the crisis of legitimacy and credibility that it has encountered in recent years, the co-operative firm unionism that became dominant in those years frequently failed to defend independently and equitably the interests of labor. If the workers saw their standard of living markedly improve, by contrast the conditions of labour ³ and the mechanisms to protect employees put in place by the State were frequently well below European norms.