A Fifty Year History of Industry and Labor in Postwar Japan

A Fifty Year History of Industry and Labor in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Kazuyoshi Kōshiro
Publisher: 日本労働研究機構
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Reviews the history of the labour movement and industrial development in Japan from 1945 to 1999.

A Fifty Year History of Industry and Labor in Postwar Japan

A Fifty Year History of Industry and Labor in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Kazuyoshi Kōshiro
Publisher: 日本労働研究機構
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Reviews the history of the labour movement and industrial development in Japan from 1945 to 1999.

Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan

Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan PDF Author: William D. Hoover
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 081087539X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
The Historical Dictionary of Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan relates the history of postwar Japan through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations.

Disparaged Success

Disparaged Success PDF Author: Ikuo Kume
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173184X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Japanese scholars have begun to challenge conventional wisdom about effective labor organizing, and Ikuo Kume has written the first book in English to advance their controversial theory. Since at least the early 1980s, the power of organized labor has weakened in most advanced industrial countries. The decline of organized labor has coincided with the decentralization of labor-management relations. As a result, most observers assume that decentralized labor is destined to lose power in a capitalist economy, and that enterprise unions will tend to be docile and powerless. Kume documents the one notable exception. The Japanese trade union confederation has steadily grown in importance, expanding its scope beyond individual companies to national policy making. Kume traces the achievements of enterprise unionism in private firms. Labor, he argues, slowly gained legitimate corporate membership by establishing joint institutions with management. By the 1960s, labor-management councils, stimulated by foreign competition, had become a widespread feature of Japanese industry. Soon unions were regular participants in the government deliberation councils and in the information exchange that shaped policy when inflation hit the Japanese economy. The unions had become a full partner by the 1980s and were crucially involved in the 1993 defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party after thirty-eight years of rule.

The Wages of Affluence

The Wages of Affluence PDF Author: Andrew Gordon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674037816
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Managerial hegemony was achieved only after a bitter struggle that undermined the democratic potential of postwar society. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel. This industry was at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth, a primary site of corporate managerial strategy and important labor union initiatives. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon traces worker activism and protest in the 1950s and '60s, and how they gave way to management victory in the 1960s and '70s. He shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He illuminates the Japanese system with frequent references to other capitalist nations whose workplaces assumed very different shape, and looks to Japan's future, rebutting hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image. Gordon argues that it is more likely that Japan will only modestly adjust the status quo that emerged through the turbulent postwar decades he chronicles here.

The Economic and Business History of Occupied Japan

The Economic and Business History of Occupied Japan PDF Author: Thomas French
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317270088
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The Occupation era (1945-1952) witnessed major change in Japan and the beginnings of its growth from of the ashes of defeat towards its status as a developmental model for much of the world. The period arguably saw the sowing of the seeds of the post-war flowering of what some term the ‘postwar Japanese economic miracle’. However, some scholars dispute this position and argue that the Occupation's policies and impacts actually hindered Japan's recovery. This volume addresses this question and others surrounding the business and economic history of this crucial period. The chapters presented in The Economic and Business History of Occupied Japan are authored by major scholars of the Occupation from the U.S., Japan, and Europe. The chapters are divided into three sections: 'Planning, reform and recovery', 'Industries under the Occupation', and 'Legacies of the Occupation era'. Following an introduction focusing on the historiographical background, the first section examines zaibatsu dissolution and its significance, the role of Japanese businessmen within the Occupation's reforms, the crucial impact of Japan's postwar Materials Crisis, and the impact of reform at the local level in Hokkaidō. Part two looks at a number of individual industries and their development during the era, including the fishing, automotive, and cotton spinning industries. The final section looks at the human impact of the changes of the initial postwar years, including the reintegration of repatriates into the Japanese labour force and the impact of changing working patterns on society and family life. This book covers a key period of the economic and business history of Japan and presents numerous new approaches and original contributions to the scholarship of the Occupation era. It will be of interest to scholars of modern Japan, economic history, business history, development studies and postwar U.S.-Japan relations.

Postwar Japanese Economy

Postwar Japanese Economy PDF Author: Mitsuhiko Iyoda
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1441963324
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Since the end of World War II, the Japanese economy has seen rapid changes and remarkable progress. It has also experienced a bubble economy and period of prolonged stagnation. The book seeks to address three major questions: What kind of changes have taken place in the postwar years? In what sense has there been progress? What lessons can be drawn from the experiences? The book is organized as follows: It begins with an overview of the postwar Japanese economy, using data to highlight historical changes. The four major economic issues in the postwar Japanese economy (economic restoration, rapid economic growth, the bubble economy and current topics) are addressed, with particular focus on the meaning of economic growth and the bubble economy. The next chapters examine the important economic issues for Japan related to a welfare-oriented society, including income distribution, asset distribution, and the relative share of income. Another chapter deals with the household structure of Japan, the pension issue, and the importance of the effect of demographic change on income distribution. The final chapter gives a brief summary, examines quality of life as a lesson of this research, and briefly outlines a proposal for a basic design towards achieving a high satisfaction level society. This book will be of interest to economists, economic historians and political scientists and would be useful as a text for any course on the Japanese economy.

Gender Struggles

Gender Struggles PDF Author: Christopher Gerteis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174945
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
"In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce and put in place measures to promote women’s active participation in union activities. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by their American occupiers; rather, they pressured thousands of women labor activists to assume supportive roles that privileged a male-centered social agenda. By the late 1950s, even Japan’s radical socialist unions had reestablished the primacy of conservative gender norms, channeling women’s labor activism to support political campaigns that advantaged a male-headed household and that relegated women’s wage-earning value to the periphery of the household economy. By showing how unions raised the wages of male workers in part by transforming working-class women into middle-class housewives, Christopher Gerteis demonstrates that organized labor’s discourse on womanhood not only undermined women’s status within the labor movement but also prevented unions from linking with the emerging woman-led, neighborhood-centered organizations that typified social movements in the 1960s—a misstep that contributed to the decline of the socialist labor movement in subsequent decades."

Institutional Change in Japan

Institutional Change in Japan PDF Author: Magnus Blomström
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134180578
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This is a new analysis of recent changes in important Japanese institutions. It addresses the origin, development, and recent adaptation of core institutions, including financial institutions, corporate governance, lifetime employment, and the amakudari system. After four decades of rapid economic growth in Japan, the 1990s saw the country enter a prolonged period of economic stagnation. Policy reforms were initially half-hearted, and businesses were slow to restructure as the global economy changed. The lagging economy has been impervious to aggressive fiscal stimulus measures and has been plagued by ongoing price deflation for years. Japan’s struggle has called into question the ability of the country’s economic institutions, originally designed to support factor accumulation and rapid development, to adapt to the new economic environment of the twenty-first century. This book discusses both historical and international comparisons including Meiji Japan, and recent economic and financial reforms in Korea, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and New Zealand, placing the current institutional changes in perspective. The contributors argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom that Japanese institutions have remained relatively rigid, there has been significant institutional change over the last decade.

The Role of the State and Industrial Relations

The Role of the State and Industrial Relations PDF Author: Adalberto Perulli
Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V.
ISBN: 9403506628
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
The Role of the State and Industrial Relations Edited by Adalberto Perulli & Tiziano Treu The new era of industrial relations that has been stealthily changing the world of work in recent decades seems to have reached a stage where it can be systematically monitored and analyzed, in great part because the “creeping renationalization” that has been noted since the financial crisis of 2008 has reinvigorated state intervention in essential economic structures. The contributions in this unrivalled book provide important new perspectives on the many challenges inherent in the present and future of the relationship between industrial relations and the state. Analyzing industrial relations systems from international, supranational, European and national points of view—and with an interdisciplinary approach connecting labour law, commercial law, corporate governance and international law—this one-of-kind book examines such salient aspects of the subject as the following: cooperative versus conflictual industrial relations systems; phenomenon of constitutionalization of power by multinational enterprises; competitive, illiberal and protectionist patterns of state regulation; freedom of association and industrial relations; potential power of transnational collective bargaining; impact of worktime arrangements; role of European Works Councils; exemplary value of the German system of workers’ participation; and global framework agreements. Using a comparative approach (the European Union, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, India), the book reconstructs the general framework of global industrial relations, considering challenges and future prospects and proposing a new agenda for the state. Contributors include widely renowned professors of labour, commercial and international law, as well as experts from the International Labour Organization and the International Society for Labour and Social Security Law. The debate about industrial relations and the state in our globalized world is of major concern for practitioners in governments, companies, employers’ associations and trade unions, as well as for company managers, entrepreneurs, consultants, judges, human rights lawyers and academics interested in labour, industrial relations and social rights in European and international contexts.