Party Politics and the Japanese Labor Movement: Rengo's "New Political Force"

Institutional Change in Japan

“…Furthermore, in an archetypal not-in-my-back-yard response, individual unions and union industrial federations are also prone to oppose liberalization when their own industries are involved. Rengo has for years been attempting to forge a "new political force" in the form of a new political party that would represent the interests of the employee and that could wrest control of the government from the grip of entrenched interests that now block the path to a neoliberal/social welfarist institutional restructuring (Carlile 1994). However, here too Rengo has been perennially frustrated.…”

“…Still, prior to the mid-1970s, the more radical, left socialist wing under the national center Sohyo remained a formidable force within the labor movement, while the moderate elements associated with Sohyo's rival, Domei, were nominally committed to a social democratic line that implied substantial alterations in the political economic institutions that had been established under the ruling conservatives. It was not until the early 1980s that one can meaningfully speak of a coming to terms on the part of the labor movement with the existing institutions of the Japanese political economy (see Carlile 1994;Shinoda 1997;Kume 1998). The two key indicators of the Japanese labor movement's "corporatization" were the de facto declarations of support by moderate labor leaders for a neoliberal institutional reform agenda promoted by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone in the early 1980s, and the rise to hegemony in the labor movement by these moderate elements by the mid-1980s.…”

“…It is for this reason that the labor movement consistently supported parties like the Japan Social Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialist Party, and the Democratic Party that have championed major alterations of the status quo. But this, in turn, sustained a certain distance and mistrust between the ruling conservatives and the labor movement mainstream that prevented the two sides from cementing a fully secure and fully stabilized political relationship (Carlile 1994).…”