Andrew Gordon, The Wages of Influence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan.

Lewis, Michael

Andrew Gordon, The Wages of Influence. Labor and Management in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1998).

SOME YEARS AGO I met a young employee of a major Japanese electronics firm who had been sent overseas to represent his company. It did not take long for many of his acquaintances to privately refer to him as "Mr. Toshiba," a title comparable to "Mr. General Electric." The name stuck because the employee enthusiastically put his company first in everything. Family, play, daily schedule, and distant plans--he arranged these to conform to Toshiba's convenience. The company came up so often in his conversation that no one could doubt his total commitment to the firm.

Andrew Gordon's splendid study of labour and management in postwar Japan explains the creation of what might be called a Mr. Toshiba generation. Covering the period from the mid-1940s to the mid-1990s, he traces the rapid rise and even faster fall of militant unionism at Nippon Kokan (NKK), Japan's second largest steelmaker. The story is hot unrelieved tragedy because, as the title Wages of Affluence suggests, taming belligerent unions has been accepted by the Japanese public as a trade-off that helped create general prosperity.

Nor is the tale finished. As Gordon makes clear, the managers governing the Japanese employment system continue to possess the capacity to change it to overcome challenges to what he calls an existing "corporate-centered hegemony." Gordon's presentation of the history of postwar labour as not bound by some fabled set of essential cultural factors, his persuasive demonstration that there is no Japanese gene for group harmony and cooperation, is one of his work's most important contributions. His consideration of the incidents, policies, and even chance occurrences that shaped today's employment system deflates past theories about the secrets of Japanese corporate success and more recent but equally sweeping predictions of Japan's looming economic collapse.

Gordon's account covers the decades beginning with the rise of militant unionism soon after World War II. Japanese government suppression of labour organization ceased abruptly in 1945 and in the 16 months following the surrender mass organizing campaigns brought 40 per cent of the Japanese workforce into unions. (39) The US occupying force supported an unfettered labour movement until Cold War strategy contributed to reversing the policy in the late 1940s. The revocation of American support and the resurgence of many of Japan's prewar political leaders and management methods in major industries and companies slowed the unionization movement. Labour organizations, however, continued to struggle for political autonomy and workers' rights until the late 1950s. But as management reforms began to take hold and after two divisive walkouts in 1957 and 1959, steel plant unions abandoned striking for higher wages.

After the watershed years of the late fifties, steelmakers and unions peacefully bargained over wages and other terms of employment. The outcome benefited companies whose profits and productivity usually grew far faster than workers' wages. Management also gained ever greater control over the workplace. NKK and similar enterprises used company standards, made without extensive consultation with union or worker representatives, to define employee merit and calculate wages. Company managers also tightened regulation of where and when workers would work. By appealing to the greater good of the firm and the nation, managers pushed rationalization and efficiency programs that pressed workers to fit the job and demanded more and more overtime. To internalize the corporate vision within workers and expand it to embrace their families, firms also implemented extensive in-house education and recreation programs while carrying out a "New Life Movement" to make wives supportive of their husbands' workplace function. By the 1960s, these efforts had created a US-style business unionism that permitted peaceful negotiations over wages but kept management authority off the bargaining table.

Gordon explains how the system became immovable as the "hegemony of corporate values took hold in the workplace and wider society." (131) He demonstrates that the struggle was waged on many fronts, including within the unions themselves. On the international level, the Cold War and US subsidization of non-political unions helped define the limits of labour protest, Meanwhile, the home front saw carefully orchestrated mass movements sponsored by companies and the state produce a gendered division of labour. The Ministry of Education assisted the creation of the emerging corporate-centered hegemony by devising a hellishly competitive educational system whose widely accepted crowning standard of success became admission to a brand-name university followed by a job in one of Japan's foremost companies.

According to Gordon's analysis, labour unions were ill suited for the postwar contest with major corporations and their allies in industrial federations and government ministries. Business leaders could meet privately on the golf course or at exclusive restaurants to plan strike-busting tactics or long term strategy. They could also draw upon sizeable war chests to stop worker protests and provide incentives for compliance with company goals. But unions, comparatively democratic and transparent organizations, lacked the means to maintain their importance in workers' lives. Gordon illustrates this by noting that even victory in courts of law could unintentionally weaken unions. As the courts forced companies to retain workers, albeit at jobs and locations determined by management, they usurped the union's function of defending the employee's right to work.

As Japan's consumer society flourished, sclerotic labour organizations became increasingly irrelevant to securing the worker's economic success. By the 1970s, around the lime I first met Mr. Toshiba, a NKK text on labour relations could state without qualification that "[o]ur labour, livelihood, and social contributions only exist via the organization called a corporation." (133)

Gordon convincingly argues that Japan's corporate-centered society remains solidly established today. The greatest threat to this order is hot labour activism but employee apathy toward and alienation from both company and union officials. Although Gordon recognizes that these attitudes have caused new tensions in the workplace during the economic slowdown of the 1990s, he sees no resurgence' of worker support for a union solution to their woes. He also appears convinced that the existing corporate-centered hegemony, believed in and supported by the very people it oppresses, is fully capable of mutating its way to survival how-ever hostile the present environment.

Using workers' accounts, company records and handbooks, government reports, and interviews with NKK managers and labour activists, Gordon makes a well supported and persuasive case for his interpretation of Japan's postwar labour history. I disagree less with his explanation than with his emphasis on the elements that produced it. Many of the factors he cites as postwar developments actually have their roots in the history of prewar labour. An example of this is the company-supported mutual aid societies, the forerunners of postwar cooperative unions, that emerged in the coal mining industry after World War 1. Bearing names such as Mitsui's "Mutual Love Association," these organizations aimed at creating the industrial peace and corporate profitability realized fully during the period covered in Wages of Affluence. Gordon, the author of major studies on prewar labour, is undoubtedly aware of prewar-postwar continuities. His emphasis on labour's lost opportunity, the road not taken, is a dramatic presentation of postwar events, but seems a bit disingenuous. Although he may be right in noting that the postwar labour system was "remade," it certainly wasn't made from scratch.

This work's representativeness poses another small problem. As a study of the history of postwar urban Japan's industrial workforce, Gordon's analysis is perhaps the finest study presently available. But despite the book's subtitle, "Labor and Management in Postwar Japan," and the author's use of NKK to generalize about the Japanese workforce, the vast majority of Japanese workers do hot labour in immense enterprises. Nor do they receive the perquisites such as lifetime employment or union representation offered (or once offered) by the minority of firms at the top of Japan's economic "dual structure." Although aspects of Gordon's analysis certainly apply to general management-worker relations throughout Japan, it is concerned first with industrial workers and not "salarymen," "office ladies," people on the lower tier of Japan's economic "dual structure," or the workforce in regional enterprises.

Similarly, one can question the totality of corporate-centered hegemony. I recall that many of the people who mocked Mr. Toshiba's devotion to the firm were themselves Japanese company employees. Their ironic detachment suggests something less than an unequivocal belief in the goodness of a corporate-centered life. More recently, popular challenges to industrial polluters and protests opposing nuclear power plans have captured the 'public's attention. Japan's newspapers, magazines, and academic journals have also been awash in articles critical of the missing Japanese father and the disintegration of the family caused by the "salaryman's" demanding marriage to the corporation. These developments suggest a public no longer convinced that what is good for NKK is good for Japan.

Although readers may disagree with Gordon's interpretation-on minor-points, there is no denying that this work is a major accomplishment that reshapes our understanding of postwar Japan's labour history. His analysis is not only fresh and persuasive, it is also well written. This makes his interpretation accessible to a wide audience who will be rewarded with a rich, subtle, and informed understanding of contemporary Japanese society by reading this book.

Michael Lewis

Michigan State University