ABSTRACT
Until the 1980s, discussion in Europe on the ‘Japanese challenge’ or the ‘Japanese model’ was characterised by a focus on the raw facts of Japan’s export offensive, its technological potential, high rates of economic and productivity growth, and in particular the comparatively low wage costs. It was the later global interest in the phenomenon of ‘lean production’, prompted in particular by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study (Womack et al. 1990) on the car industry, which served to turn attention increasingly to the Japanese system of industrial relations-centred on team working, a degree of individual employee autonomy at the workplace, job enrichment, job enlargement and, not least, the social productivity of employees. However, discussion of lean production in the West often overlooked the fact that one of the central pillars of the Japanese production system was the strict demarcation between core and peripheral workforces, and that the numerical flexibility of peripheral workforces, achieved through highly gradated supply chains, was a precondition for the sought-for task flexibility in the sphere of final assembly undertaken in core plants. These elements comprise the three distinctive features of Japanese industrial relations in comparison with those found in Europe, bearing in mind the differences between national European systems referred to above. They are:
• team working; • the strict segmentation of core and peripheral workforces; • the importance of company/workplace-level collective bargaining and
enterprise unions.
