The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan

by Andrew Gordon

Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Managerial hegemony was achieved only after a bitter struggle that undermined the democratic potential of postwar society. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel. This industry was at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth, a primary site of corporate managerial strategy and important labor union initiatives. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon traces worker activism and protest in the 1950s and '60s, and how they gave way to management victory in the 1960s and '70s. He shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He illuminates the Japanese system with frequent references to other capitalist nations whose workplaces assumed very different shape, and looks to Japan's future, rebutting hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image. Gordon argues that it is more likely that Japan will only modestly adjust the status quo that emerged through the turbulent postwar decades he chronicles here.

Genres: Labor, Japan

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

A specialist in the history of modern Japan, Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1981 in History and East Asian Languages after completing a B.A. from Harvard in 1975.

Reviews

[Garrett Strain · Rating 3 out of 5]

At its best when describing the labor struggles of the 1950s to oppose one-shot wage bargaining with Japanese steel companies. But doesn’t adequately explain how this defeat led to the long-term institutionalization of a cooperative labor relations model. Also doesn’t describe the exceptions to this model, like the mine workers who had won greater shop floor control over hiring, transfers and work processes but were only mentioned in passing as an example that Japanese steel companies feared.

[Jayce Cherry · Rating 3 out of 5]

If this is a field you are interested in (labor or postwar Japan) then it is a good read! That said, I read this book for a class and found it a bit boring and structurally confusing. Hence the very middle-of-the-road review!

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in the post-bubble moment, when Japan went from Asian tiger to paper tiger, this book does great work examining the processes by which the much touted "Japanese system" of labor management both fails and feeds its work force. This is of particular interest for anyone who wants to better understand how global labor became tamed in the 1970s. Of course it destroys any beautiful fairy tales of an essentially and traditionally harmonious relationship between labor and management in Japan.

What's missing is an E. P. Thompson-style illustration of the lived life of labor in Japan.

[Maboo · Rating 2 out of 5]

My rating is kind of unfair. I'm just not into labor history, so it says more about me than about the book.