Women and Unions in Contemporary Japan

Résumé du document

Post-war Japan has seen considerable change with regard to women. The 1946 Constitution guaranteed for the first time, the equality of men and women under the law. Subsequently, the revised Civil Code and a range of domestic laws, including the Fundamental Law of Education and the Labour Standards Law, prompted improvements in the legal status of women in the society as a whole. At the workplace, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1986 prohibits discrimination of women with regard to recruitment, job assignment and promotion. Despite these reforms, the equality of men and women is not achieved in practice. The persistence of a gender inequality in Japan is notably striking in the composition of the workforce and at the workplace. A simple example: the gender wage gap in Japan is twice the OECD average. In Japan, companies play an important role in the life of people, they organize and structure the entire society, the dominant force shaping the fate of women often happens to be these corporations: their rules, their management, their employees, and their union.

Extraits

[...] Women and Unions in Contemporary Japan Foreword Post-war Japan has seen considerable change for women. The 1946 Constitution guaranteed for the first time the equality of men and women under the law. Subsequently, the revised Civil Code and a range of domestic laws, including the Fundamental Law of Education and the Labour Standards Law, prompted improvements in the legal status of women in society as a whole. At the workplace, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1986 (revised in 1997) prohibits discrimination against women with regard to recruitment, job assignment and promotion. [...]

[...] These various women's groups as well as organizations such as women's centers go beyond the subject of this work. They nevertheless must be acknowledged because they manifest women's involvement in alternative organizations and stress the difficulty in studying women's activism in Japan since this activism is very diverse. These numerous and various women's groups demonstrate the ability of women to create coalitions and to form broad-based organizations around shared goals and interests (Murase 2006: 26). However, the high number of women's groups may also contribute to the low level of women's participation in male-dominated unions, accentuated by the fact that they did not contribute to the rise of a high-profile activism around women's labor, or at least not until the 1970s and the emergence of the uuman ribu (women's lib movement). [...]

[...] Bibliography Benson, John. The Development and Structure of Japanese Enterprise Unions. Japan Focus, Nov 2008: http://japanfocus.org/_John_Benson- The_Development_and_Structure_of_Japanese_Enterprise_Unions Bishop, Beverley. Globalization and women in the Japanese workforce. Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies / RoutledgeCurzon p. Broadbent, Kaye. Ford, Michele (edited by). Women and labour organizing in Asia : diversity, autonomy and activism. London; New York: Routledge p. [...]

[...] Actually, the use of women's labor as a safety valve to adjust the workforce in case of economic downturns participated to the success of the Japanese economy. Notably in the 1950s, women were removed from jobs that were in direct competition with male workers and put into lower-status roles and insecure employment. Most of the time, women found only positions in peripheral small and medium-sized firms on which large firms relied. This allowed employers in large firms to restructure and insure the lifetime employment system (Broadbent 2006). [...]

[...] Kaplan Daniels, Arlene. Women and Trade Unions in Eleven Industrialized Countries. Philadelphia: Temple University Press p. Pages: 217-237 Tsurumi, E Patricia, Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan, History Workshop Journal, Oxford University Press 18(1):3-27. Uno, Kathleen S. in Beauchamp, Edward R. (éd). Dimension of Contemporary Japan: A Collection of Essays. A Garland Series Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training : http://www.jil.go.jp/english/laborinfo/library/documents/workinglifepro file07_08.pdf OECD Labour Force Statistics: 1987 - Edition Japan Echo June: PROBLEMS WITH EMPLOYMENT. [...]