External evaluation committee issues critical assessments and warnings to Rengo activities

An evaluation committee comprising seven people, including lawyers, academics and journalists, has recently released a harshly worded interim report to the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo). The committee was set up by Rengo with the purpose of having external intellectual leaders examine the trade union's activities in order to rebuild and revitalize its programs, and achieve its goal of developing more socially-oriented labor movements.

In evaluating these movements, the report concluded that:
"Today's labor movement is not winning public sympathy and support," and
"Labor movements will become irrelevant to society if left as they are now."

In response to these "shocking"evaluations and serious warnings, the committee proposed the following specific topics for reforming Rengo's activities:
1. Breaking away from company-based unions; 2. Adopting an organizational strategy of targeting all workers as union members; 3. Upgrading activities on hand, including those of regional communities and individual workplaces; 4. Realizing parity of wages and other working conditions; and 5. Networking for implementing social reforms.
The committee also called on Rengo to work out specific action plans and time schedules and immediately start implementing them.

As specific plans, the committee proposed the following programs:
Launching a part-timers' union; encouraging local unions to implement regional activities; strengthening the organizing capacity; taking a more aggressive approach to young people's employment issues, including the increase in the number of job-hopping part-time workers; realizing nationally uniform minimum wage levels to guarantee workers' livelihoods; and having the labor unions run and manage unemployment insurance systems and educational and training systems.

At the same time, the committee called on union members to change their attitudes to enable the rebuilding of a sense of "solidarity" among them.
All of these are tough proposals, made from the viewpoint that "labor unions must be in the forefront of social developments."

Labor unions in postwar Japan had long cherished a wish to "unite under a common purpose," and Rengo was finally created with the merger of major labor unions. More than a dozen years have passed since then, during which Rengo has made tireless efforts on a daily basis. It organized debate meetings to listen to local union members' opinions; it also worked hard to draw up drafts of policy system requests to make their demands heard directly by the government. So, not a few people must be wondering why, despite such efforts, the unionization rate continues to drop.

Although said to be an economic superpower, Japan is seeing an increase in the number of individuals who are being jettisoned from its ever more competitive society. It may be said that labor movements--at least some aspects thereof--are unable to catch up with the rapid changes being seen in the social structure and people themselves.

It remains to be seen if and how Rengo will make use of the evaluation committee's interim report and to what extent it will discuss the issues it raises.