Workers and Unions

Abstract

In the industrialized democracies, labor unions negotiate with employers and states mostly about labor conditions and social security issues by organizing workers as political leverage and seeking participation in workplace decision making. It is known that Japanese labor unions are organized as enterprise-based unions. After enjoying initial success in the immediate post-war period, workers and unions were increasingly mobilized in the service of corporate productivity, and gradually lost their power and authority at workplaces. Jun Imai confirms that a long-term decline in the power of labor unions has occurred in terms of their strength, their exercise of power in the form of labor disputes and in their participation in workplace negotiations.