Ithaca; London: ILR Press [imprint of Cornell University Press], 2016. xviii, 216 pp. (Illustrations.) US$44.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-0305-8.
Zacharias-Walsh’s book examines feminist labour unions in Japan from the embedded perspective of the author’s activism with the Women’s Union Tokyo and a collaborative, multi-year, US-Japan women’s labour organizing project. The book examines the history, structure, and functions of Japanese Women’s Unions (JWUs), an alternative to Japan’s male-dominated enterprise unions. JWUs respond to women’s workplace issues such as gender pay inequity, sexual harassment, lack of child care, and bullying. Zacharias-Walsh shows the limitations of JWU organizing as a long-term solution for women’s workplace problems, while recognizing their place within a broader women’s movement for advocacy and public policy change in Japan. Teasing out implicit assumptions behind labour organizing models, logics, and strategies of a wide variety of US and Japanese activism groups, the book would make a stimulating addition to graduate and advanced undergraduate discussions of transnational activism and social movements in social sciences, labour studies, and gender studies classrooms.
The book shows how JWUs emerged as part of a broader movement of alternative labour union organizing in response to labour-market deregulation that has resulted in a steep rise in non-regular, part-time, and temporary workers, a majority of whom are women. Unlike typical Japanese company-based enterprise unions, JWUs are community unions drawing workers from a specific geographic area on the basis of gender rather than by “company, industry, or occupation” (2). JWUs are individual-membership, service-based unions, helping workers with grievances on a case-by-case basis “for hire” the way an insurance agency or law firm might operate (47).
Zacharias-Walsh came to the Women’s Union Tokyo (WUT) as a long-time labour activist in the United States and attributed her ability to write about JWUs to the WUT’s openness to self-scrutiny, innovation, and outside analysis. The WUT began in the early 1990s with two paid staff, volunteer help, and a membership of about 250 unionists. Most workers reported joining the union because their company had no union; some joined clandestinely when company unions failed to help them (21). Though WUT never saw itself as a service union because of their ambitions for activism (48), they faced organizing challenges typical for service unions. An endless stream of women called their labour counselling hotline, but then failed to join as long-term union members, quitting the union when their grievances were resolved. This practice added to the union workload without building up the organization. Although the service model helps women immediately in need of assistance, the burnout potential and difficulty in achieving company reforms is precisely why service unions fell out of favour in the US in the early 2000s, Zacharias-Walsh says (48).
WUT leaders sought help with this problem so that they could expand membership, develop new leadership, and free up time for advocacy. With Zacharias-Walsh’s assistance, they established the US-Japan Working Women’s Project, a Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership-funded collaborative project, the biggest subject of the book. In the author’s telling, the project was fraught with frustrations—from mundane bureaucratic hassles to large differences in cultural assumptions about women’s labour organizing. The biggest cultural clash between US and Japanese women’s labour activists, Zacharias-Walsh finds, was JWUs’ emphasis on building a broad-based women’s movement to empower women as individuals, compared to the American labour organizers’ emphasis on building collective-bargaining power in the workplace. American labour organizers in project workshops were taken aback, for example, when JWU activists stated categorically that they “reject the idea of [union] recruiting on principle” (121). JWU activists, rather, saw it as essential and empowering for women to come to the union on their own as individuals, to deliberately go against the grain of collectivist male-dominated labour unions and companies. In some ways, their movement was more feminist than unionist per se.
Despite these insights, the book sometimes slides into unhelpful cultural generalizations about the US and Japan. For example, the author says bullying in Japan has “been raised almost to an art form,” whereas US workers stand up for themselves and “it’s the guy who kisses up to the boss that sits alone at the lunch table” (29). These are observations that might be surprising to Americans who have no union representation at all, or who have experienced bullying in the workplace only to see weak unions let them down. The author generalizes, based on pitfalls in the grant project, that “knee-jerk negativity was just part of the [Japanese] culture, of women’s groups, and of society at large” (139), despite the fact that elsewhere the author recognizes examples of JWU organizational openness, as well as the difficulty of “translating” American organizing concepts into a very different institutional framework for Japanese labour.
For this reason, the book would benefit from a more developed discussion of how JWUs fit into the Japanese political system, compared to labour organizations and working women’s movements in the US. JWU efforts face steep uphill battles from both feminist and unionist perspectives, given the traditionalist nature of large women’s organizations in Japan, the difficulties of using lawsuits to effect social change, and the weakness of union-affiliated left political parties in Japan.
Perhaps, then, one of the most tangible successes of the grant project deserves greater appreciation: that they were able to create a platform for organizing among JWUs nationally, helping them distribute the work of labour education and training, and they were able to create a springboard for JWUs to organize with counterparts in Asian countries, too. The other productive outcome, of course, is Zacharias-Walsh’s book itself, which gives readers a window into the challenges of alternative labour organizing for working women within Japan and across national boundaries. While the grant ended, the larger project is still very much a work-in-progress in both countries that can benefit from the book’s interesting discussion and which may open up new avenues for academics to join the conversation.
Liv Coleman
The University of Tampa, Tampa, USA