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.