The DWS: Deregulation of Working Time and Its Impact on the Effort—Bargain

Abstract

The labor market reforms examined in the last chapter did not have a strong impact on the mobility aspects of employment relations for regular workers. The reforms did not provide institutional support for regular workers to change employers (as well as for firms to discard regular workers), which means the preservation of the institutional base of effective workplace control at Japanese firms. Concurrently, there has been another line of reforms in the last two decades that concerns working time regulations in order to reduce working time and also to reorganize workplace control especially for regular white-collar workers, the latter of which is the particular focus of this chapter. The workplace control was renegotiated through the reforms of working time since the organization of working time directly associates with the contract/effort aspect of employment relations in two fronts. They are the issues of the work/nonwork boundary and the bargaining on wage and effort at workplace: inherently contested domains that deal with worker control (Rubery et al. 2005).KeywordsLabor UnionEmployment RelationAdvisory CouncilJapanese FirmProfessional OccupationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.