Women Workers in Japan

By M. N. Weinstein

In the April issue of What She Wants, Linda Hertz wrote of her experiences as an industrial worker in a Cleveland area firm. She spoke of learning her skills through the kindness of individual male co-workers, and of her growing antipathy for management. Her anti-management feelings were deepened by cuts in jobs, the closing of plants, and the lack of appreciation for employee loyalty. She told WSW that she heard Japanese businesses related differently to labor and wondered what effect their practices had.

Lately, Japanese business practices have been of increasing interest to American management. Yet a small amount of research on blue collar women workers in Japan and the Third World raises some important issues for women workers in general. More than pointing up the similarities of Linda's experience with others like her around the world, the Japanese experience highlights what may be even greater threats to women achieving equality in the work force.

Japan's recovery from the 1972-73 oil shock was the most successful of any capitalist country. Japan now comprises 10 percent of the world gross national product, and her share of markets world-wide has increased beyond any of her foreign competitors' expectations. The reality of Japanese superiority in the areas of high technology and automobile products have caused protectionist responses in Europe as well as in the U.S.

Most business journals and writers attribute Japan's success to these things: 1) so-called lifetime employment policies; 2) seniority-based pay raises; 3) unionism which is company based, not industry based; 4) allocation of resources and capital to longrange projects and long-range product/market development at the risk of short-range benefits; and 5) combinations of these which foster employee loyalty and quality control at the production worker level. In addition, there is the traditional explanation that the "character" of the Japanese culture and its workers-especially concern about loss of face and allegiance to hierarchical systems-fosters worker participation and worker stability. Finally, most U.S. analysts cite the support in both planning and financing which the Japanese government gives to its industry. The role of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry in the guidance of national industrial growth lends to private competition and industrial development a uniformity of national direction and support.

All these explanations are true of Japanese industry. What is not spoken of as readily, however, is the plight of women workers in Japan. In addition, the changes taking place on a national level in Japan, directing industrial growth away from materials and manufacturing to high technology and knowledge intensive production, pose a particular threat to women workers all over the world.

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Japanese women are employed primarily as parttime factory workers. They are, true to Japanese tradition, afforded little respect, and are barred from accepting night-time employment. Women pressured into taking "voluntary" leaves when demand falls, and hence comprise a "reserve army" to support the permanent employment of men in major industries. The role of the woman in Japanese management is hardly growing in a society known for its patriarchy. The primary role of women in Japanese business is as help-mates and "entertainers" for Japanese businessmen. Finally, Japanese industry, in its move toward knowledgeintensive products, i.e., computer software, encourages women college graduates to specialize in these areas, as the demand for software programmers is five times greater than the male graduates can fill.

Page 4/What She Wants/May, 1982

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The result is fewer women in skilled manufacturing or management.

We in America tend to believe that Japanese labor practices are truly humane and visionary. Yet, Japanese industrial and trade strategy for the 1980's demonstrates that the opposite is true. Increasingly, Japanese production is instituting what are called "flexible manufacturing systems". These include robots and computer-aided design and manufacturing systems. The Japanese contend that they are finding new jobs for those workers displaced by automation, but the reality demonstrates that eventually

Cindy Fredrick / L.N.S.

Japan will face increasing unemployment due to restructuring of its industrial base.

The rationale is that new markets in high technology products will demand a more educated and skillful workforce. To accommodate that need, the bulk of Japanese business attention is focussed on capital investment in research, development, and marketing of high technology and biotechnology products. The result is less concern with worker needs, and more concern with appropriate mixes of technologized production and worker productivity.

This move toward high technology manufacturing systems and products presents other problems to women in the Third World, as well as Japan. Third World women are marketed by countries luring multinational high tech firms as the "ideal" workforce. Their "delicate hands" are presented as the perfect tool for compiling micro chip technology, a task which takes a tremendous health toll on women who sit at microscopes ten hours a day, soldering computer chips. The average wage for such work in Asia is $3 per week. The opportunities for career advancement are nil. In fact, turnover in these industries is encouraged, as the eyes and general health of the women wear out.

Women today comprise approximately one-third the international labor force. In most Third World countries, women must deal not only with exploitative labor practices, but with technology and urbanization as well-huge cultural shifts which American women have grown into and up with. The number of illiterate women is steadily rising in Asia and the Third World, while their manual skills are being sold as the backbone of multinational invest-

ment opportunities in high technology manufacturing.

The trend in capitalism today is toward "world" products. World products are those which are produced in various parts of the world. A micro chip is molded and designed in the U.S., or even Germany. Then the components are shipped to Asia where they are assembled by women in sweatshops, and then shipped to a third country for packaging and marketing. The same concept is now being employed in the auto industry and several other heavy manufacturing industries.

What does it all mean? First, it means that the issues of blue collar women workers in America are intimately linked with the poorly paid Third World women labor force. Second, it means that women's equality in blue-collar, pink-collar and even whitecollar positions is threatened by the drive toward a new industrial reality. Automation, whether it be total office systems or flexible manufacturing systems, will shift the problems of labor from issues of minority and women's equity to problems of massive unemployment and displacement. Third, the prototype of Japanese labor relations which is now touted as the "answer" for American labormanagement relations is only a temporary palliative. For soon, very soon, the issues of worker participation and lifetime employment will be superfluous to industry. What will matter, whether in Japan or America, will be the lack of and hence the demand for high technology experts and services. The rate of output of engineering and systems-trained personnel in all industrial countries supersedes the issue of fair employment of women whose skills will no longer be relevant. At this time in the United States, many more men than women are being trained in computer programming and systems engineering programs.

The problem posed is really one of time. Western capitalism, and that includes Japan, is in a mad race to develop the last stronghold of products. Intelligence and genetic products represent the only new areas for product development left to the industrialized world. This is why the major growth industries in the world are not food, or housing, or transportation, for these are relevant only in undeveloped markets, where consumption for profits is far off. The industries of product innovation relevant to industrialized markets are communications, high technology systems, and biogenetic research. Japan and the Western capitalist nations are in hot pursuit of these products and the markets in which to sell them. Rationalization of the work process and production are the major concerns. Women, more than ever before, have only a limited, though massively exploitable, role in that global game.

As to the starving millions, or the millions craving justice, they mean nothing. They are not consumers of the new technology, nor are they knowledgeable laborers. Hence, the real message that world-wide and Japanese women workers must address is the elimination of a social structure which at its best found some useful role for women, and at its worst is planning on women's insignificance in the work force. The problem with technology is that it penetrates a culture faster than people can see. Technology will equalize the struggles of women all over the world, as well as threaten the progress we've already made.

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