Abstract
This book addresses the important topic of recent changes in Japanese employment relations, particularly during the economic stagnation and restructuring since the mid-1990s, by examining the liberalization of state regulation and related changes in employment relations across different segments of the labour market. One key argument is that employers have increasingly driven the agenda of (de)regulatory change, while union influence has declined. Another is that restructuring involves a continuing division between ‘regular’ and ‘non-regular’ forms of employment but a substantial growth in the proportion of non-regular workers. Finally Imai argues that workers across both these broad categories have experienced increasingly diverse but predominantly worsening job security and effort bargains.
A valuable feature of Imai’s book is his use of a wide range of recent official data and Japanese scholarship alongside his own research. The discussion is quite dense in places, but it benefits from a well developed conceptual framework. As an historical institutionalist, who analyses Japanese employment relations as political and cultural constructions, Imai focuses on the state, employers and organized labour as key actors, all operating on an inherited institutional terrain but with scope for creative interventions. These actors address the underlying indeterminacy of labour by structuring both workplace employment relations and worker mobility in wider labour markets, and Imai identifies three interacting aspects of this process – the labour contract, effort bargains and labour mobility. Finally, he identifies different ‘levels’ in the construction of employment relations: societal, where state regulation and welfare policies are central; organizational, where the wider societal framework is fleshed out; and finally, within the workplace. Together these conceptual distinctions frame the arguments developed throughout the book.
An initial overview of employment relations in post-war Japan maps the evolving relationship between long-term organizational careers among ‘regular’ employees and varied forms of non-regular employment. It also registers the role of tripartite consultation and policy formation (‘corporatism with labour’) which is contrasted with the more recent role of employer-dominated ‘Deregulation Committees’. A chapter on the ‘political segmentation of the labor market’ underlines the central role of political mobilization and policy formation in the recent growth of new non-regular employment forms. Part-time work (defined more by gender than hours) and loaned labour grew from the 1960s, but a major expansion in varieties and amounts of non-regular employment occurred from the early 1990s, as the leading employers’ organization pushed for liberalization of the labour market. Imai traces how, through several waves of legislative reform in the 1990s and 2000s, temporary dispatch agencies, legitimized in a limited way in the 1980s, were given much wider scope and themselves became important actors in labour market restructuring. By 2007 a third of the workforce fell outside regular employment and lacked access to organizational careers. Furthermore, the contrast between regular and non-regular employment took an increasingly generational as well as gendered form, associated with a growing range of non-regular categories (though ‘paato’ remained the largest).
Next Imai focuses on the operation of ‘discretionary work systems’, analysing how the deregulation of working time altered the terms of workplace effort bargaining for many ‘regular’ white-collar employees. After earlier reductions in scheduled working hours, successive waves of regulatory change from the 1990s reduced or annulled the associated ‘overtime payments’ in favour of flexible work-time regimes and unpaid overtime, thus intensifying the effort bargain for those affected. This development meshed with other changes to employment relations among regular employees, the focus of Imai’s final substantive chapter on the spread of ‘results oriented’ personnel management systems within enterprises. A detailed case study at a leading electronics company explores how pay levels and career pathways have increasingly been differentiated. Wider inequalities among regular employees are generated as rewards and progression become tied to new forms of monitoring and evaluation that emphasize performance against defined targets rather than experience and seniority. Imai identifies some complexities in these developments – workers are implicated in processes of ‘self management’ but often remain ambivalent about the objectivity of evaluations; managers avoid narrow indices of performance to retain their discretion; union officials embrace the ‘fairness’ of apparently objective criteria for differentiating among employees – but overall he argues such reforms reinforce employee compliance and management prerogatives.
The label ‘corporatism with labour’ may risk overstating the influence of organized labour in the boom years, but Imai demonstrates very clearly that recent decades have involved ‘reform without labour’, in part because of the limitations of enterprise unionism and despite the emergence of new forms of social movement activism/unionism. In his overall analysis the relationship between structure and agency sometimes remains ambiguous, as an emphasis on the imperatives of growing white-collar employment and international competition coexists with highlighting the role of radical deregulationists in driving change. Nevertheless, Imai’s final argument concerns the importance of developing a more effective strategy and voice for employees if the costs of restructuring for labour are to be addressed.