Japan’s unions ‘are built around men’; could a female leader change that?

Women have never found a welcoming home in Japan’s labor unions. Sexism is entrenched. Problems like wage discrimination and sexual harassment at work are often ignored. Many women, lacking a voice, have given up on the movement.

So when Japan’s largest association of labor unions, known as Rengo, appointed its first female leader last October, the excitement was tempered with a heavy dose of skepticism.

The new chief, Tomoko Yoshino, knows the feeling well: After decades in the labor movement, she understands the failings of Japanese unions as well as anyone. But she is confident that she can make her appointment a powerful tool for reform.

“The fact that I want to make gender equality a part of all of Rengo’s activities has gotten a lot of attention,” she said in an interview, adding that it had put pressure on the group’s member organizations to “demonstrate real results.”

Proving that unions can be strong allies to working women is critical for the future of Japan’s once-mighty labor movement, which has largely failed to attract women even as their numbers have rapidly expanded in the country’s workforce.

To recruit female workers, unions will need to fight for measures that help women manage both their jobs and the heavy expectations they face outside work, including standing up for women facing sexual harassment and discrimination and pushing companies to provide more help with child care.

Japan has one of the world’s worst records on gender equality, placing 120th out of 156 countries in a ranking by the World Economic Forum, even after years of government promises to help women “shine.”

The country’s unions reflect this imbalance, said Keiko Tani, who helps run a nonprofit dedicated to assisting women navigating workplace issues.

She said women often needed help, for example, after being punished for taking maternity leave. But most unions, she said, still focus on old models of employment that assume a traditional family structure in which the husband works “24 hours a day and leaves housework, child rearing and the other things regarding his personal life to his wife, a professional homemaker.”

In the 1990s, Tani and her friends became so fed up with the sexism in Japan’s unions that they quit and started their own. She said that while she was cheering for Yoshino’s success in bringing reform, a lifetime of disappointment with the labor movement had taught her not to get her hopes up.

“Unions are built around men,” she said. “It’s going to be difficult for any leader to break that mold and make new changes.”

Midori Ito, a longtime labor activist, said gender discrimination in unions had been so bad for so long that many women had “completely given up on them.”

She dropped out of the union movement years ago because of frustration with its lack of action on the issues confronting Japanese working women. “They don’t listen to us,” she said.

The problems with Japanese unions do not end with their treatment of women. While interest in labor groups has surged in the United States in recent years, they have become increasingly marginalized and irrelevant to many Japanese workers, said Kazunari Honda, a professor of human resources management at Mukogawa Women’s University who studies gender in the labor movement.

Today, unions represent just 17% of Japan’s workforce, making it difficult for them to effect meaningful change.

As unions’ influence has waned, another force in Japan’s economy has been on the rise: non-regular workers, who fall outside the country’s traditional model of jobs for life.

Since the 1980s, the number of non-regular workers in Japan has more than doubled, to almost 37% from 16% — some 20.6 million workers — in 2021. Nearly half are women, who have become disproportionately represented among non-regular employees as the percentage of female workers younger than 65 rose nearly 20% over the last several decades.

Unions have long been reluctant to include non-regular workers because the organizations are focused on protecting the prerogatives of their “regular” counterparts: better benefits and higher salaries.