May 2001

Japanese women's extra hours of work

Tokyo--We are indeed befriending the labor left here, especially a general union for women. Japanese women activists are fighting a lot of the same problems American workers face: temporary and contingent work, part-time work, layoffs, absurdly long work hours. Japanese workers are forced to give the company work after hours. This is such a common occurrence there is a full second rush hour on the trains every night around 11 p.m.

Women only make about half what men make; even those with a college degree are relegated to "fetch" jobs for men and are assigned to a second career track that keeps them trapped at low-level jobs throughout their working lives. In some places all women employees are required to clean the office after work.

Women employees have long been used to cushion "regular" employees from layoffs--one of the dirty secrets of lifetime employment is that it was only possible by forcing one segment of the labor force to remain permanently "temporary." The unions, mostly company-based, accepted this situation because it was a way to guarantee that men could keep their jobs. And after all, we have to care for the men first....

Now women are fighting back. Workers who have been "downsized" are organizing. Minority unions are forming in opposition to company unions. That's the good news. The bad news is minority unions have very little leverage, and the companies and the company unions have a plethora of well-honed techniques for crushing dissenters. While Japanese labor law in many ways looks better on paper than American labor law, it's as full of holes and as lacking in teeth as American labor law is.

With the ongoing recession, dangerously low birth rate, and other cracks in the shell, Japan is clearly ripe for change. The question is, will it come from the Right or Left? Certainly there are rumblings from below, but how far they'll be able to take it, we shall see.

One thing they do want is more contact with activists in the west. Activism has been (essentially) absent from the scene for so long these workers are almost building a movement from whole cloth. The workers I've talked to aren't looking for a model to follow or someone to lead them.

But I think they desperately want a dialogue they can engage in and learn from.

--Anne Z-W