In 1985, due to a growing sense of domestic and foreign pressure (gaiatsu) [Gelb, 2000] and other globalization processes, combined with a desire to improve its image in the international community in line with the recently (1980) ratified UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)1 [Hendry, 1993, 43], the Japanese government passed the Equal Employment Opportunities Law (EEOL) which took effect in April 1986 [Lam, 1993, 207]. The law was much contested, with critics labelling it as “toothless” [Mikanagi, 2000, 121] in that it merely besought employers to “endeavour” to eliminate discrimination without providing any punitive legislation for non-compliance [Masae, 2005, 197-198]], as well as focusing on the fact that it targeted only women, “leaving male corporate culture essentially untouched” [Iwao, 1993, 177, 184]. In 19972 the government passed revisions to the EEOL which took effect in 1999, in an “effort to strengthen the voluntary nature” [Miller, 2003, 203] of the law amidst growing concerns over the falling birth rate and its relation to female work patterns [Takeda, 2005, 177].
To what extent has this highly contested piece of legislation influenced employment practices in Japan? As Miyamoto asserts, “improvements in the professional standing of working women are still lagging” [2006, 23], and yet women now make up over forty-one per cent of the labour force [Yuasa, 2005, 195]. As is oft the case within the socio-political economy of Japan, there are indeed signs of change and continuity. What form have these “palpable changes” [Miller, 2003, 197] taken, how have they occurred, and whom do they effect? In what ways, if at all, have male employees been impacted by the law? Has the EEOL alone been a catalyst for change, or are other factors due credit? In what manner have Japanese corporations reacted to the law, and has it, as in Lam’s view, “reasserted management control over the agenda of change” [Lam, 1993, 219]? By examining some of the “diversification of working patterns” [Miyamoto, 2006, 23] that have emerged, it becomes clear that in actuality it is the external forces of the market and globalizing economy that have encouraged change in employment practices, with the EEOL acting as a tool by which business has shaped the labour force to its own ends.
Consider the extent to which the EEOL influenced female participation in the workplace. Although the law did open doors that had previously been closed to women, they did not initially benefit to any great degree. Indeed, to a large extent the law simply codified rights and protections that women had already gained through litigation [Bishop, 2002, 38], and as Miller [2003] has argued, it actually then had a limiting effect on the ability of female workers to make further gains by recourse to litigation. From 1960, the number of women in clerical roles had expanded, whilst those in blue-collar work decreased [Ogasawara, 1998, 19]. Although women did make some inroads into the workforce, “labour market changes and pressures had pushed major companies to introduce policies to utilize better the abilities of women before the introduction of the EEO law” [Lam, 1993, 197] due to the labour shortage that faced Japan during the period of high growth and the rapid expansion of the service economy.
The fact that from 1960 through 2004 the number of women in the labour force grew from 18.3 million to 27.4 million [MHLW, 2004, 2, quoted in Macnaughtan, 2006, 33], and according to the Ministry of Labour the average length of service among women grew from 4.5 years in 1970 to 6.8 years in 1985 [Lam, 1993, 200] (as shown in the flattening of the M-curve) is further evidence that corporations were making greater use of women prior to the EEOL. The genesis of such inroads was the shortage of skilled labour in technical roles [Imada, 1994, 3, quoted in Bishop, 2002, 46], which due to their increasing levels of education, women were ready to fill. Certainly young, educated women did make progress through the 1980s, as they “surpassed their male counterparts in terms of the new graduate employment rate in 1991” [Nakata & Takehiro, 2002, 521].
As the economy entered the boom of the ‘bubble’ years there was even greater need for labour and plenty of the ‘economic pie’ to be shared around. However, considering that “between 1982 and 1992, the most common career destination of women graduates from four-year universities actually changed from professional” [Bishop, 2002, 46] to clerical jobs, it can be said that neither external forces nor the EEOL exerted much of positive impact on female workers. The EEOL aside, market and economic conditions were clearly the main factor behind the utilization of women and, as we shall see, were also the reason for which “women were the primary casualties of the unemployment downturn that confronted the Japanese economy” [Gelb, 2000, 392] during the ‘lost decade’ [Kingston, 2004, 10 – 12, 98] of the Heisei recession following the bursting of the economic ‘bubble’ [Katz, 1998].
As a result of the recession, it was women workers who bore the brunt of the ensuing cutbacks, thus fulfilling their role as an ‘economic cushion’ in times of corporate belt tightening. Despite the EEOL being in place, after 1992, what little gains women had made began to erode resulting in an ‘ice age’ [Kondō, 2006, 16] for women who sought employment, “while men continued to find employment with relative ease” [Miller, 2003, 169]. Therefore it is plain that in the absence of a labour shortage, women became surplus to requirements, further supporting the notion that the previous increase in employment of women was due to market forces rather than the introduction of the EEOL.
Perhaps the single most important – and unforeseen – change in employment practices came about as a direct result of corporations’ reaction to and provision against the EEOL. As Miller [2003] asserts, “ a two-track hiring system emerged in Japanese companies as a tangible by-product of the EEOL’s enactment” by which management could control and filter recruits into either a clerical track (ippanshoku) or management/ career track (sōgōshoku), segregating workers and pay profiles by gender. This was achieved in spite of the EEOL by circumventing the ‘spirit’ of the legislation by couching the requirements for entry into the managerial track in terms of geographic mobility and the ability to make a long-term commitment to the company including prolonged hours of work and overtime, thus not explicitly referring to the gender of employees as a negative attribute.
As Lam [1992, 108] explains, “Offering women some opportunity is viewed as legitimate. Assigning one or two women to managerial jobs, while all the rest are assigned to clerical ones is seen also as fulfilling the objective of ‘not excluding’ women”. The letter of the law could be further avoided by offering a ‘choice’ to prospective workers at the time of their application. Generally speaking, female applicants would select the clerical track due to their inability or lack of desire to sacrifice themselves outright to the whims of the corporation, whereas men were automatically placed on the management track. As women had ‘chosen’ the clerical track of their own volition charges of discrimination could not be brought against their employers. Certainly the promotion of women to managerial posts is limited, as “only eleven per cent of management positions nationwide were held by women as of 2004” [Lewis (BBC), 2005, 1], and “although long hours and geographic mobility help to explain the ultimate separation of the two tracks along gender lines, the under-representation of women in the managerial track is not the result of women’s choice alone” [Miller, 2003, 201]. “Career tracking is particularly prevalent among firms with over 5,000 employees, of which 49.8% used the system in 1992” [Gelb, 2000, 391].
The initiation of the dual-track system served the needs of management and to a degree the vested interests of core male employees, as offering women true equality of opportunity would destabilise the male employment system in terms of promotion and job security making it harder for companies to obtain complete dedication from their male employees.
Core (for the most part male) employees had access to career advancement, training, benefits and bonuses, and steadily rising pay based on the nenkō seniority system within the security of ‘long-term employment’ [Itoh, 1996, 235]. Although such core workers were costly to their firms, the investment in training and high pay was considered justified in light of the return management could expect; prolonged, uninterrupted dedication from an increasingly skilled and loyal employee. From the point of view of the worker, it was much the same – the promise of long-term employment security, coupled with continuing pay and career advancement. Although few firms today base employment completely on this principle it is still thought that the “nenkō living wage enhances overall worker morale and, thus, improves labour productivity” [Nakata & Takehiro, 2002, 536].
As far as the corporations were concerned, women represented a bad investment as they supposedly (and statistically) had a lack of mobility, commitment, and a strong tendency toward labour market intermission. This was generally due to the – mostly management initiated – ‘traditions’ whereby “according to a panel survey of the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 70% of women quit working after the birth of their first child” [Miyamoto, 2006, 25] or upon marriage, after which they generally return several years later as low paid part-time or non-regular workers. Women were thus deemed most suitable only for the provision of a cheap, flexible, and readily renewable labour source that would require a minimum of benefits and training, if at all.
However, the nenkō system is flawed in that it assumes continued economic growth in order to keep advancing the salaries and status of core workers. The seniority system moves people up the ‘elevator’ continuously, and even when firms were “bleeding red ink they had to go right on bringing in young workers to fill the positions on the foremost parts of their frontline” [Jō, 2006, 19]. The realisation of this meant that with the onset of economic stagnation enterprises offset the “high costs of long-term regular employment by expanding ‘flexible’ part-time and temporary employment” [Gottfried, 257]. “This has given rise to a trend towards phasing out general ippanshoku jobs as companies found it advantageous to replace ‘OLs’ (office ladies) with temporary workers and thereby reduce fixed costs” [Ogasawara, 1998, 36].
Thus it was that via the institutionalised segregation of the labour force along gender lines into an ‘elite’ core of predominantly male workers, and a peripheral level of low maintenance females, consolidated through manipulation of the EEOL, that business could further alter employment practices to serve its own needs. Indeed, “one of the most significant effects of restructuring in response to globalization is the increase in the use of non-regular workers” [Bishop, 2002, 39].
To preserve the long-term employment and the nenkō systems so as to protect core career-track workers from the distress of the recession in order to maintain productivity, loyalty, and internal stability, corporations – with the aid of government policy [Bishop, 2000, 109] – were able to channel female labour away from regular employment and into unstable, unprotected work as temporary, part-time, or dispatch workers. As the “profound and palpable gloom” [McCormack, 2001, xiv] of the recession deepened business expanded utilization of this growing source of cheap, flexible, and readily available labour. In 1995 Nikkeiren (Japan Federation of Employers Federation) recommended a shift toward a new management style, dividing the labour force into three categories; a core workforce (although to be reduced) within the long-term employment and nenkō systems, specialists (senmonshoku) [Lam, 1993, 212] on short-term contracts paid according to merit, and a third mass of flexible labour to provide numerical flexibility [Bishop, 2002].
Initially it was women who once again were impacted upon by this policy, although as the frosty claw of the ‘Ice Age’ began to reach out for even male graduates a greater proportion of the labour force found itself locked out of the relative safety and benefits of regular employment, and relegated to this newly created lower stratum. This cohort, unable to secure permanent employment at the normative stage in their life-course became the much discussed ‘freeters’ (furītā), moving fluidly from job to job, whilst enjoying none of the benefits available to regular core-workers [Mathews, 2004, 124]. As many as sixty per cent of freeters are women [Miyamoto, 2006], further demonstrating the manner in which female labour suffers at the hands of such employment trends. As has recently been made clear, despite economic upturn these freeters seem forever locked out of core worker status, as although corporations have finally begun to increase recruitment [Kondō, 2006, 16], “having missed out on their one chance to get on the track, they have been fated to an unstable life” [Jō, 2006, 22] of irregular employment. In this way, business can be seen to be returning to tried and tested methods, and ensuring a pool of irregular labour to be used as needs dictate.
As Bishop [2002] asserts, in order to deal with “the reciprocal effects of globalization Japanese business has pursued a dual strategy. It has attempted to reorganise the regular work force by segmenting it to reduce cost, and to facilitate the use of non-regular workers, who have little job security, in order to increase numerical flexibility.” The prominence of part-time workers is beyond doubt, having risen from 4.5 million in 1985 to as much as 12.1 million in 2002, while “the number of dispatch workers has risen to 1.7 million during the same period” [Macnaughtan, 2006, 37]. The great majority of dispatch workers are young people whose role, as traditionally was that of women, “is one of a cushion protecting the generation of employees already ensconced within the seniority systems” [Jō, 2006, 19].
What conclusions can be drawn? In what ways can the enactment of the EEOL and its subsequent revision be said to have changed employment practices in Japan? That change has occurred is beyond doubt. And yet, there remain enough signs of continuity with past structures and practices to argue that change has been limited or at best regulated in order to preserve core aspects of the status quo between labour and capital. As we have seen, the participation and role of women in the work force had begun to increase before the EEOL came into force, due to the pressures of demographic and market forces faced by Japan in a globalising economy.
Certainly such participation was often peripheral to the core employment of male workers, and yet it was regular. During the labour shortage of the boom years, women provided a much needed and readily available source of workers. In a (successful) attempt to ‘limit the damage’ to be caused by the EEOL corporations devised and implemented the unexpected, yet highly effective dual-track employment system, thus, for the most part, channelling female labour away from entry into the long-term employment and nenkō systems, in order to preserve existing work practices and maintain the stability, loyalty and productivity of the existing core (male) workforce. During the period of economic stability and plenty, it was both easy, and beneficial for business to pay lip service to the ideals of the EEOL.
However, following the bursting of the ‘bubble’ and the ensuing economic downturn it was women who were first to feel the negative effects of restructuring and cost cutting that were so pervasive during the recession. The EEOL and the dual-track career system allowed business to institutionalise the segregation of labour along gender lines thus providing an economic cushion not only for the corporations themselves, but also for those core employees already within the long-term employment system. Once management had realised the benefits of such a flexible and fundamentally unprotected labour source, it was but a small step to initiate the consolidation of a system whereby women and eventually all but an elite of graduates were relegated to a lower class of non-regular, inexpensive, and flexible labour that could be easily exploited to fit the needs of business.
That corporations have not fully broken away from tried and tested methods has been evidenced by their return to the recruitment of large numbers of fresh graduates now that economic stability and growth appear to have been achieved once again [Jō, 2006]. Ultimately the EEOL has resulted in the creation of the dual-track employment system, and the segregation of labour – for the most part along gender lines – into a level of core, regular elites, and an underclass of part-time, temporary, and dispatch workers. However, it can be argued that economic pressures and market forces have been the consideration upon which such changes have been initiated.
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NOTES
1. “The EEOL was spurred by the international community’s newfound focus on women’s issues that began with the United Nations’ designation of 1975 as the International Women’s Year. This in addition to the U.N. Decade for Women (1975 – 85) provided the impetus for the creation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women” [Miller, 2003, 193].
2. “The law was revised in 1997 to actually prohibit discriminatory treatment against women regarding recruitment, employment, assignment, promotion, education and training, welfare programmes, mandatory retirement age, retirement and dismissal, and introduced the sanction that, if a firm consistently violate prohibition, the labour ministry can publicise this fact” [Bishop, 2002, 43].
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