Labor Markets, Trade Unions and Social Justice

In his chapter, "The Japanese Labor Market" (with the collaboration of Konosuke Odaka), in Asia's New Giant (Hugh Patrick and Henry Rosovsky, eds., Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1976), Professor Walter Galenson seems to view labor-management relations almost as a zero-sum game supported by a fierce adversary spirit on both sides. If a pattern of labor-management relations works well for management, it must by definition bode ill for labor. Since Galenson's heart lies with labor, he would not accept a pattern of labor-management relations as reasonable unless he were sure that all of its major aspects had been desired and promoted by labor unions and imposed on the reluctant management. Considering "permanent commitment" to be the essence of the Japanese labor-management relations, Galenson suggests "that, for a number of reasons, it has been a completely rational policy in terms of costs and benefits for large Japanese employers, and that although workers welcomed the job security that it brought, particularly in the decade after World War II, the main reason for its survival has been economic efficiency" (p. 619). Save for this overlap of worker and management interests in the Japanese employment system, Galenson has almost no kind words to say about the benefits of the system to workers or unions. "Japanese working people," he says (p. 655), "do not enjoy a standard of living consonant with the nation's per capita income. Further, it is our hypothesis that to a considerable degree this has resulted from the inability of the labor movement to exercise any real influence on national economic policy." One (the fourth) of his conclusions reads: "…. because of economic and political weakness, the Japanese labor movement has been unable to secure for its members a level of social welfare or a degree of industrial democracy consistent with the nation's level of development" (p. 669).