Post-war Japan has seen considerable change with regard to women. The 1946 Constitution guaranteed for the first time, the equality of men and women under the law. Subsequently, the revised Civil Code and a range of domestic laws, including the Fundamental Law of Education and the Labor Standards Law, prompted improvements in the legal status of women in the society as a whole. At the workplace, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1986 prohibits discrimination of women with regard to recruitment, job assignment and promotion. Despite these reforms, the equality of men and women is not achieved in practice. The persistence of a gender inequality in Japan is notably striking in the composition of the workforce and at the workplace. A simple example: the gender wage gap in Japan is twice the OECD average. In Japan, companies play an important role in the life of people, they organize and structure the entire society, the dominant force shaping the fate of women often happens to be these corporations: their rules, their management, their employees, and their union.
[...] In fact, the history of labor movements in Japan reveals that Japanese women were conscious of their poor working conditions and have initiated or largely contributed to labor movements for the improvement of the conditions of employment and the workers' quality of life. At the beginning, women's contributions were mainly individualistic and unorganized. Far from being submissive tools, female workers did not hesitate to protest through songs for instance, and escapes from factory dormitories and suicides were common methods to defy employers and reject time commitments imposed by their contracts.[8] Referring to a government survey of 1900 Tsurumi reports that, in an unnamed mill near Osaka dormitory residents and 2,046 commuting women ran away, the former figure representing 81 percent of the mill's dormitory residents, and the latter 86 percent of its commuting female workers (Tsurumi 1984). [...]
[...] In Japan, women have long been expected to be devoted to their family and home. To allow them to be available for such tasks, and to ensure that their husbands would remain dedicated employees, female participation in the paid labor force has been largely restricted to part-time or temporary work, and the women have been encouraged by diverse incentives (tax policies, work rules ) to leave their job after marriage (Schoppa 2006: 5). A higher proportion of women than men are also employed within small and medium-size firms, often non-unionized (Bishop 2005: 91). [...]
[...] The ability of women to engage in full-time wage labor is still mainly determined in Japan by the sexual division of labor, and the attitude of unions reinforce and institutionalize this situation. If they want to gain equality and to protect their rights, women have no choice but to engage in alternative organization which does not reduce their participation in other unions, since they simply do not have access to them. On the contrary, organizations such as women-only unions mark a turning point in women activism today, because it challenges more than ever the legitimacy of existing male dominated unions. [...]
[...] Women's departments appeared mainly within peak labor organizations and industrial federations; it is rare for enterprise unions in Japan to have a dedicated ‘women's department'. Rengo is presently pursuing a policy of increasing the number of women on committees or within union structures. Nevertheless, in 1999, Rengo's Central Executive Committee was composed of 7.7 percent of women, which is still a low percentage given that women represented 27 percent of union membership, and this rate moreover fell to 6.6 percent in 2000 (Japan NGO Report Preparatory Committee 1999 as cited by Broadbent 2003: 125; Rengo, International Division 2002: 52 as cited by Broadbent 2006). [...]
[...] Table 1 Trends in labor force population and labor force participation rate Women Men Proportion of labor force population comprised by women Labor force population (10,000 persons) Figure 1 Trends in number of employees (all industries) Source: Japan Institute of Workers' Evolution - http://www.jiwe.or.jp/english/situation/working.html At the same time as this increasing share of women in the labor force, women comprise only 17 percent of trade unionists, and this figure is decreasing each year. In late 1949, the percentage of women who were unionized peaked at 51 per cent but then dropped to 30.9 per cent in June 1954. [...]
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