Contesting Precarity in Japan: The Rise of Nonregular Workers and the New Policy Dissensus

By Saori Shibata

Contesting Precarity in Japan details the new forms of workers' protest and opposition that have developed as Japan's economy has transformed over the past three decades and highlights their impact upon the country's policymaking process.

Drawing on a new dataset charting protest events from the 1980s to the present, Saori Shibata produces the first systematic study of Japan's new precarious labour movement. It details the movement's rise during Japan's post-bubble economic transformation and highlights the different and innovative forms of dissent that mark the end of the country's famously non-confrontational industrial relations. In doing so, moreover, she shows how this new pattern of industrial and social tension is reflected within the country's macroeconomic policymaking, resulting in a new policy dissensus that has consistently failed to offer policy reforms that would produce a return to economic growth. As a result, Shibata argues that the Japanese model of capitalism has therefore become increasingly disorganized.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ILR Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501749940

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CONTESTING PRECARITY IN JAPAN

The Rise of Nonregular Workers and the New Policy Dissensus

Saori Shibata

ILR PRESS

AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. From Coordinated to Disorganized Capitalism in Japan

2. Organized Labor and Social Conflict in Japan

3. From Precarity to Contestation

4. Precarious Labor Power and Japan’s Neoliberalizing Firms

5. Precarious Labor and the Contestation of Policymaking in Japan

6. Japan’s Absent Mode of Regulation

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

This book benefited from the guidance, comments, support, and suggestions of many people throughout the research and writing process. Part of the research was conducted at the University of Birmingham, where Peter Burnham provided me with important advice, feedback, and oversight. Others who read and commented on the text as it developed, and to whom I am grateful, include Werner Bonefeld, Peter Kerr, Julie Gilson, Mark Beeson, Juanita Elias, Andre Broome, Len Seabrooke, Ben Clift, Kasia Cwiertka, Lindsay Black, Aya Ezawa, and Guita Winkel. Fran Benson provided important editorial encouragement as the book traveled through the publication process. I also thank the union and NPO activists who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this research, and who continue to impress me with their ongoing efforts to fight for precarious workers. I especially thank David Bailey, without whose support this book would not have been published. Finally, I also would like to thank my children, Itsuki and Masaki, who continue to make my life exciting—and who also instructed me to acknowledge them!

Abbreviations

Introduction

Japan, the third-largest economy in the world, appears increasingly unable to generate a sustainable standard of living for its population. Low pay, job insecurity, sluggish economic growth, unaffordable housing, excessive working hours, rising public debt, labor shortages, and declining fertility have each become a stubbornly persistent problem facing Japanese society. As a result, they have grown in prominence in the national debate, routinely troubling the country’s politicians, media, and the wider public. This lingering malaise was initially summed up by the notion of a lost decade, which subsequently became two lost decades and is now nearing the end of a third lost decade (Botman, Danninger, and Schiff 2015). This contrasts starkly with the situation in the 1980s, when the Japanese model of capitalism—with its commitment to lifetime employment, stable industrial relations, and innovations such as Toyotism and just-in-time production—was widely considered to be the new face of high-growth, high-technology capitalism, generated by an inclusive approach to labor relations. The Japanese model had been widely considered a miracle of economic development, allowing Japan to recover from the defeat and devastation of the Second World War to become a leading economic power with the potential to rival the United States as the next global economic hegemon (for characteristic portrayals of Japan’s economic miracle, see Friedman 1988; Johnson 1982; on Japan’s anticipated hegemonic potential, see especially Arrighi 1994). The transition between these two remarkably different contexts is typically dated to the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble in 1991.

This book traces the post-1991 transformation of the Japanese model and the unraveling of the institutions that until that point had appeared to constitute a mutually beneficial form of coordination between business, organized labor, and a developmental state. It charts the decline of Japan’s postwar economic institutions and the subsequent emergence of a new and growing body of precarious, or nonregular,¹ workers. This echoes similar developments globally, where neoliberal reforms have resulted in the emergence of a new group of precarious labor, the precariat (Standing 2011). While the emergence of this new class of precarious workers represents a weakening of Japanese labor and a corresponding worsening of workers’ standard of living, we can also witness the emergence of new forms of resistance, protest, and dissent associated with this new social group. Japan’s growing class of nonregular workers are also adopting new ways to oppose and contest their precarious working and living conditions. As we shall see, this new disruptive potential has created significant problems for Japan’s political and economic elite.

Since 1991 we have witnessed a process of creeping neoliberalization. Yet such efforts have been increasingly thwarted and obstructed by a social coalition built around opposition to precarity and the protection of precarious workers. Faced with this new wave of opposition, and in a context where at least a rhetorical commitment to social stability and inclusion remains in place, Japan’s policymakers and business leaders have found themselves having to backtrack, resort to making concessions, or completely abandon their attempts to implement neoliberal reforms. It is this new contentious political economy of Japan, and especially the influence of this new group of nonregular workers within it, that this book sets out to uncover. Where previous contributions to research and the literature have tended either to lament the passing of Japan’s era of social harmony and prosperity or to highlight the continuing distinctiveness of Japan’s political economy, this book shows how Japan’s political economy has changed, but not only in ways that represent the defeat of labor. Indeed, as we shall see, if anything the turbulence witnessed in Japan’s political economy reflects precisely the inability to pacify Japan’s new precarious working class.

The Rise of a Contentious Nonregular Workforce

Around the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, terms such as working poor, Net Café refugees, NEETs [not in education, employed, or in training], McDonalds refugees, and "haken" (dispatch workers) began to appear with increasing frequency in newspapers and television news. These mentions were in reports of an apparently new form of in-work poverty growing in Japan. Nonregular workers especially were identified as a key group whose members were suffering from low wages and insecure employment, fitting a pattern that many had identified with the onset of the neoliberal reforms introduced across the global political economy, especially in the Global North.² Their problems include uncertain, short-term, and rapidly adjustable (or flexible) patterns of employment, low wages, and a lack of social benefits or other workers’ entitlements (Vosko 2010; Harrod 2006).

As part of this growth in nonregular employment, Japan has also witnessed a growing number of protests, which have both sought to highlight the plight of Japan’s precarious workers and attempted to oppose and resist the new conditions that they were experiencing. The global economic crisis, sparked by the subprime crisis of 2007 and associated in collective global memory with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, saw an acceleration of each of these trends. December 2008 saw the broadcast of a series of reports depicting homeless and newly unemployed workers queuing at a soup kitchen in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park. Foreshadowing what would become common occupations of public squares in 2008, workers, activists, and trade unionists collectively undertook an occupation of this public space in Tokyo, protesting both the corporations that had caused the homelessness and impoverishment of their former employees and the government’s apparent unwillingness to do anything to address the issue (on the wave of public space occupations that arose in the wake of the global economic crisis, see especially Tejerina et al. 2013; Flesher Fominaya and Cox 2013; Gerbaudo 2017). The occupation of Hibiya Park, known as Hakenmura (temporary camp for the unemployed and homeless), symbolized the social anxiety and fear rising in Japan at the time. It also prompted an ongoing public debate regarding the new working conditions at the center of Japan’s changing model of capitalism.

The conditions under which nonregular workers are employed in Japan are systematically worse than those of regular workers. Nonregular workers earn, on average, around one-third of the salary of regular workers. As we shall see, nonregular workers have routinely experienced problems with the under- or nonpayment of wages. Nonregular work is often considerably more dangerous than that of regular work. This became particularly visible in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, with nonregular workers outnumbering regular workers in the Fukushima nuclear power plant 9,195 to 1,108, and low-paid contract workers speaking of hiding their injuries during the cleanup to avoid problems with their employers (Herod 2011).

The emergence of this new class of nonregular workers in Japan has been widely noted, but commentators have tended to underestimate the ability of this new social group to both mobilize and influence Japan’s politics and economy. As Richard Watanabe states, unions’ efforts to organise non-regular and marginalised regular workers have been insufficient (2015, 510). This, he claims, is in part the result of regular workers’ tacit approval of the deregulation of non-regular employment, which in turn has undermined labour’s power resources by increasing the number of unorganised non-regular workers (2018, 3–4). Likewise, Jun Imai finds that the significance of labor unions is declining and that this can be understood in terms of the long-term practice of nonconfrontational unionism: The background of this decline is the historical development of cooperative unionism that undermined their [unions’] militancy, the capability to fight against employers, for about fifty years (2017, 102). This has tended to become a more general view within the political economy literature: that Japan’s workers remain relatively passive and lack agency and the capacity to assert their interests vis-à-vis capital, and that therefore the move toward a growing proportion of nonregular workers within the Japanese labor market has gone relatively uncontested.

This lack of focus on the labor movement and its impact on politics in studies of the country’s political economy is particularly notable, given growing concerns about increasing inequality and poverty in Japan (Chiavacci and Hommerich 2017; Shinoda 2008; Goto 2011). This rise in inequality is also linked to changing trends in the labor market. In particular, the impact of flexibilization and the casualization of labor are assumed to have been generated partly by the neoliberalization of the Japanese political economy and have become key points of concern among commentators (Tachibanaki 2006; Goto 2011; Miura 2012; Song 2014; Yun 2016). Furthermore, the post-2008 global economic crisis caused a serious recession in Japan and resulted in a dramatic increase in dismissals of temporary workers (Miura 2012; Song 2014; Imai 2011; Yun 2016; Shibata 2016) and a rise in economic insecurity and social tension (Miura 2008; Shinoda 2008; Miura 2012; Song 2014; Shibata 2016; Bailey and Shibata 2014 and 2017). Despite these trends, the existing literature has tended to focus on systemic levels of change and continuity in Japan’s economy, rather than draw attention to the responses that have been witnessed by those workers and other individuals affected by these changes. Instead, the literature has typically focused on the form of the state and party system (Rosenbluth and Thies 2010; Schoppa 2011; Reed, McElwain, and Shimizu 2011); corporate governance (Aguilera and Jackson 2010; Ahmadjian 2012; Witt and Redding 2009); the coordinated market economy; and the capitalist class and/or elite-level officials and institutions, including corporate managers or state officials (Culpepper 2011; Hatch 2010; Rosenbluth and Thies 2010).

Insufficient attention has been paid to workers’ agency and contestation. When considering global) restructuring, much of the literature tends to view workers as powerless (Cumbers, Nativel, and Routledge 2008, 369). There have been studies on the Japanese labor market, including employment relations (Imai 2011; Rebick 2005), nonregular workers (Fu 2011), impacts of change in the labor market on the welfare system (Miura 2012), the segmented nature of Japan’s youth labor market (Brinton 2011), the dualization of the Japanese labor market (Yun 2016), comparisons between labor market reform in Korea and Japan (Song 2014), and between Japan and Italy (Watanabe 2014). This literature presents accounts of the transformation of the Japanese labor market, including liberalization, deregulation and dualization and the increasing number of nonregular workers and the resulting inequality in the workplace. These studies enrich our knowledge of labor and the challenges workers face. However, at times they tend to depict Japan’s workers as excessively passive and as a result consider Japan’s socioeconomic model as relatively static or stable (Ahmadjian 2012; Sako 2006; Thelen and Kume 2003 and 2006; Rosenbluth and Thies 2010, 174, Witt 2006; Anchordoguy 2005, 3; Dore 2000; Estévez-Abe 2008, 16). What are missing are an account that considers the scope for agency that has been witnessed by Japan’s new group of precarious nonregular workers and an understanding of the way in which this has contributed to the instability of Japan’s socioeconomic model.

An important element in the process of Japan’s restructuring has therefore been overlooked. The study of workers’ agency and contestation in response to the restructuring of workplace production is needed to help understand contemporary changes in Japanese capitalism. According to Jeffrey Harrod, power relations in the workplace have a tendency to produce a shared consciousness between unprotected workers with the potential to resist in the context of global restructuring (2006, 59–60). In Japan, new unions have emerged to represent unprotected workers and oppose social injustice and exploitation by corporate elites. Individual labor disputes over issues such as unpaid wages, retirement benefits, and disadvantageous changes to working conditions have increased dramatically since the early 1990s (Fackler 2008; Bailey and Shibata 2014; Shibata 2016; Shinoda 2008, 150; Miura 2008, 168). Similarly, government agencies that regulate labor matters have received a growing number of complaints (Shinoda 2008, 150). These developments increasingly demand our attention. Thus, the Japanese political economy and labor market literatures tend to overlook the scope for (and exercise of) workers’ agency and contestation. In response, this book investigates the way in which Japanese capitalism has undergone a process of restructuring, with a particular focus on the workplace and how changing socioeconomic structures have affected workers. It examines the new category of nonregular workers that has emerged as a result of recent changes to relations between capital and labor in Japan. Finally, it explores the way in which workers have responded and contributed to the construction of the Japanese political economy, as well as how the country’s model of capitalism has been transformed as a result.

Japan has witnessed the emergence of a new form of labor activism over the past twenty years. Drawing on an analysis of over 4,000 reports of acts of mobilization conducted by workers, trade unions, and other proworker organizations in the period 1980–2017 and presenting the results of qualitative research into a number of concrete campaigns and policy cases, this book highlights the changing instances of contestation conducted by changing forms of labor and the responses that contestation has produced among Japan’s political and economic elite. This includes the results of a series of interviews with trade union activists and members of nonprofit campaigning organizations, as well as official documents published by both the government and trade unions and reports from the high-quality Japanese-language news media (especially Asahi Shinbun). The book presents a more vibrant form of worker agency than what is commonly depicted. Instances of innovative social mobilization—especially that conducted by Japan’s growing population of precarious, nonregular workers—have demonstrated a capacity to contest and disrupt the aims of both firms and successive governments in their efforts to deregulate Japan’s labor market, worsen the working conditions of Japanese labor, and liberalize (or neoliberalize) Japan’s model of capitalism. It is only through a consideration of this growing presence of nonregular labor and its capacity to mobilize, oppose, and resist, the book claims, that we can understand both Japan’s prolonged period of stagnation and the tense, difficult, and often unsuccessful efforts to adopt a new model of economic growth.

Political Economy, Neoliberalism, and Precarious Labor

The trends outlined above form part of a wider set of processes that have been studied within the comparative and critical political economy literatures. In presenting the case of Japan, this book seeks to contribute to a number of these debates. In doing so, it aims both to draw on some of the key insights within the political economy literature and highlight the contribution to knowledge that an analysis of the Japanese case can provide.

The comparative political economy literature has tended to focus on the institutional, social, and political conditions that contribute to the broader socioeconomic frameworks within which national economies are located. This is often contrasted with the discipline of economics, which has tended to focus on a more abstract notion of the economy, reduced to a set of market relations entered into by equally abstract economic actors—each of whom is presumed to be governed by a standard set of nonreal assumptions. Thse assumptions include the existence of utility-maximizing agents, perfect competition, rational decision making, and so on (for some of the best current literature on the standard economics literature and the peculiar assumptions that go into the consideration of these nonreal economic relations, see Shaikh 2016; Watson 2018). In contrast, the comparative political economy literature focuses on broader institutional and social conditions that tend to distinguish between different national economies in specific concrete contexts, with a particular focus on the differences that these conditions make in terms of socioeconomic outcomes. This might include aspects such as trade union density, welfare state provisions, the degree of intervention and support offered to firms by the state, the role of different types of political parties, the impact of voter preferences, trade relations and policies, the breakdown between different types of production in specific national economies, the location of global value chains, and different degrees of social inequality, among many other considerations. For constructivist political economists, moreover, the framework of ideas about each of these aspects of the political economy are both constitutive and therefore central to an understanding of how each aspect operates, and these economists focus on the way in which particular social norms and shared understandings inform the policy paradigms that prevail in particular political economies at particular times (for a relevant discussion, see Clift 2014).

Central to debates within the recent comparative political economy literature has been a consideration of the degree to which global economic integration has precluded the possibility of different policy and socioeconomic alternatives. In the 1990s, and in the context of heightened concern about the process of globalization, much of the political economy literature turned to the question of state capacity. This included an interest in the possibility of interventionist economic policies, scope for fiscal policy discretion and redistributive welfare policies, and the extent to which trade unions could continue to assert the interests of national labor movements in an increasingly globalized economy. Especially after the publication of Peter Hall and David Soskice’s seminal Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) in 2001, the debates began to focus on what were considered to be two alternative models of political economy. The choice facing state managers, according to the VoC perspective, was between a coordinated model of capitalism in which economic agents typically entered into negotiated relations with one another, and a liberal market economy in which socioeconomic interaction was governed by more impersonal market forces (for similar approaches that adopted different models, see Coates 2005; Amable 2003; Boyer 2000). Since the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008, however, the VoC literature has become less prominent in the comparative political economy literature. This has occurred alongside a reconsideration of alternative growth models, accompanied by renewed interest in questions of whether national economic models are driven by debt, wages, or profit, and which models are likely to be most successful (Baccaro and Pontusson 2016).

In terms of its relevance for the current study, the comparative political economy literature offers a number of important insights into the types of pressures that are exerted on national economies, including that of Japan. Alternative national political economies are assumed to be relatively autonomous in the sense that they are able to adopt alternative configurations of key political economic attributes (welfare provisions, industrial relations, corporatist policymaking arrangements, and so on), but the literature also recognizes that national economies must be competitive in the global political economy, which creates pressure on them to conform to global standards of efficiency and productivity (which in turns limits the capacity for national divergence). It is this question of the interaction between national traditions and policy options, on the one hand, and global pressures to compete in