Japan: how Nakasone follows Thatcher
Socialist Viewpoint1980sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
THE renowned "Japanese economic miracle" which had reputedly provided not only rising living standards but "jobs for life" for Japanese workers is wearing very thin.
The signs were already there when Yasuhiro Nakasone became Liberal Democratic Party Prime Minister in 1980. Nakasone represented the introduction of Reaganite/Thatcher monetarist economic policies. State spending was cut on welfare services while Nakasone set to work on constitutional change to allow closer military alliance to the USA and increased military spending.
In fact Nakasone inherited an economic crisis. By the end of the 1970s the economy was not raising the revenues to meet the huge state spending programmes which had been introduced when the economy was expanding rapidly in the 1960s and early '70s.
The government met the deficit by issuing government bonds. By 1984, the interest payments alone on government bonds came to 10.2 trillion yen, the largest single item in the 1984 budget.
Despite this unprecedented situation, the government never attempted to tap the profits of the big Japanese corporations — which were at the same time running at record lvels — despite record failures of medium and small size enterprises.
Instead, like Thatcher, Nakasone's priorities have been further attacks on the working class. There have been two main attacks direct for higher productivity through the well-established "participation" schemes operating in productive industry; and the diversification of production into small and medium sized factories which are not organised even by the scab "yellow" unions which control the big plants.
Their wages are one third less than in the big corporations. Eighty per cent of Japanese workers now work for such companies, where women workers are drawn in on even lower wages. On average the wages of women are only just over 50% of their male counterparts.
The small companies make little pretence of providing security of employment fo their workers. But even the 20% of workers in the big corporations find that "job for life" is under attack.
[Photograph. Caption: Japanese cars for export.]
The companies increasingly use contract, part time or seasonal labour to which they don't have to extend job security rights.
Last year, one of the major employers' organisations made proposals for change in the law to allow workers to be forced out of one industry into another. Companies have in any case been forcing workers to move long distances and suffer reductions in grades and wages — hoping that they will resign rather than accept the new conditions.
One thousand workers at a Nissan Diesel plant near Tokyo have been in struggle since last December. Management offered new jobs for most of the workforce in plants from 12 to 60 miles away from Tokyo. For some of them the moves would have meant leaving home at 6am and getting home at almost midnight. The "job for life" being offered by Nissan didn't mean very much, and the workers chose to fight for their existing jobs.
The other feature of Liberal Democratic Party policy which resembles Thatcherite Britain is privatisation. In the spring of this year (only months behind British Telecom) the public corporation Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) was privatised. This made it the biggest private employer in Japan with 310,000 workers.
At the same time the Japan Tobacco and Salt Corporation was sold off to private capital. Now a Government report has recommended that the Japanese National Railway be sold off the private business (Japan has both private and public rail systems).
These measures have implications beyond the economic crisis and raising money to pay off government debts; they represent the other line of attack on the working class through further weakening the already emaciated Japanese trade union movement.
The Japanese unions have been moving rightward for a long time. Since the yellow unions broke the independent unions in productive industry in the early 1960s, the most progressive force in the Japanese labour movement was the socialist-led Trade Union Federation Sohyo (General Council of Trade Unions of Japan) which was comprised of public sector unions.
Sohyo was the driving force of the spring wage offensive (the shunto) which was the focal point of Trade Union activity in the 1960s. In the last 10 years, however, the shunto has run out of steam, the employers have organised against it, and the public sector unions have been weakened. Now the unions have little effect over wage levels and wage increases have been less than those achieved by workers in Europe.
At the same time there has been a fall-off of union membership. 35% of the labour force were organised in 1970; this has now fallen to 29%.
Now an even more dangerous process is taking place. It is called the "reconstitution" of the Japanese labour movement or the "unification of the confederations".
In 1982 an initiative was made to establish a new all-Japan trade union Federation, Zenminrokyo, which would embrace the whole trde union movement. In one of the most negative developments for many years in the Japanese labour movement, Sohyo is to join this new federation.
It will be dominated by the yellow unions in the export-based productive industries.
It has to be said that privtisation does face Sohyo with a very difficult situation: it stands to lose almost a million public sector workers to the private sector when the present round of privatisations are completed. At the same time, some of the unions which have been militant Sohyo unions in the past are in the grip of the right wing drift, and are falling prey to "business unionism". These are clearly factors in the decision to join the new federation.
At the same time the right wing leaders of Zenminrokyo intend to exclude any "left-wing" public sector unions from the new federation by setting up a new (and very isolated) public sector federation, and pushing them into it. Many of them will be members of unions controlled by the Japanese Communist Party — such as the Japan Teachers Union; the all-Japan Prefectural and Municipal Workers Union; the Medical Workers Union and the all-Japan Transport and General Workers Union. If it becomes isolated, the JCP intend to set up its own trade union grouping: but they will not take that step before the dissolution of Sohyo.
The JCP generally opposes strikes in the public sector since they subordinate everything to both local and national election campaigns. In the public sector, they argue that strikes are wrong, since the public services are public property and to strike would alienate the public!
The situation in the Japanese labour movement is very difficult indeed. The march to the right in the unions and the systematic supression of the remaining progressive sections of it are a response by the yellow federations to the increasing problem of Japanese capitalism as reflected in the economic crisis.
But there are many militants continuing to fight on a class struggle basis.
Although many of them have been victimised by management and by the right wing, the objective conditions are on their side. Despite the success of Japanese capitalism breaking up the independent unions in the '60s, and the success of Japanese labour techniques in harnessing the Japanese working class both ideologically and physically to the requirements of production; socialism, and a miltiant struggle against capitalism to achieve it, remains the only future for Japanese workers.
Hopefully, some of the moves now being made to bring together militant activists from the various unions will be successful.