Bob Marshall Community and Commitment

Bob Marshall Community and Commitment

Book Proposal

Working Title: Community and Commitment: Progressive Social Activism and Japan’s Worker Co-operatives

Readership

This book will appeal to anyone interested in the diversity of Japan’s contemporary culture and society, to readers who would like to understand relations among Japan’s many progressive social movements, ranging from the connection of unions and senior citizens to new approaches to urban health care delivery, to the nexus of middle-class urban housewives, biodegradable soap made from recycled cooking oil, and the monitoring of nitric oxide emissions from cars and trucks. What they all have in common is participation in a growing movement of community-based grassroots worker co-operatives that has not yet drawn notice outside Japan.

It would be attractive as well to readers interested in efforts by people to transform the social, political and economic institutions that shape their lives in more popularly responsive directions in the face of global pressures to conform to a single, worldwide model, and to readers who would like to understand better how the threads of cooperation, participation and belonging long recognized in Japanese culture now play out in shaping alternative ways of working, consuming and living a compelling, active life in the civil society of Japan today.

This book could be useful in college courses in the anthropology, sociology and political economy of Japan, as well as in interdisciplinary courses on aging, women studies, environmental studies, and comparative social movements. It could be useful in more advanced or specialized courses on alternative lifestyles in complex societies, on civil society and communitarianism, and of course, on patterns of institutionalized co-operation.

Introduction:

At least 30,000 people in Japan are now working in worker co-operatives – businesses managed democratically and owned by the people who work in them - from a standing start in the early 1980s. But these hundreds of new businesses did not simply spring into being out of thin air. Japan’s worker co-ops display many of the behaviors and attitudes characteristics of social movements in Japan and globally, an important key to their rapid appearance and growth. The time was right for worker co-operatives to develop in the final decades of the 20th century as the culmination of tendencies present within a wide range of social movements in democratic post-war Japan, among them

-  consumerism

-  co-operatives

-  trade unions

-  environmentalism

-  feminism

-  advocacy for the elderly

-  NGOs and volunteerism.

These social movements together embrace many tens of millions of members in Japan, and touch many millions more. Japan’s other types of cooperatives alone – consumer co-ops, agricultural co-operatives and credit unions -- have over 50 million members. The expanse of these diverse social movements bears the promise of the potential of the worker co-operative movement. Japan’s worker co-operatives are best understood as part or extensions of, pushed along by, started through or in connection with, and certainly inspired by, these larger and older social movements; and these movements in turn can be better understood through the lens of the movement to develop worker co-operatives, the last type of co-operative needed to complete the panoply of cooperative businesses in Japan. Looked at from a different direction, the recent dramatic growth and success of worker co-operatives during Japan’s prolonged depression also offer practical and theoretical appraisals of Japanese business, both large and small, of a sort rarely heard in a world which expects all economic activity to gravitate toward typical American patterns.

These different worker co-operatives all vary within a general pattern of close contact with “parent” social movements, but independently of one another. Deliberately examining these worker co-operatives as part of a larger set of social movements shows clearly that Japan’s worker co-operatives do not constitute an autonomous movement built sui generis from first principles and practices. Neither are they the inevitable outcome of a snowballing local tradition or the frantic Japanese adoption of yet another overseas institution. Even calling a novel social practice a “social movement” almost always over-emphasizes the degree of unity actually available to people who may embrace underlying principles, plans and aspirations. And while Japanese co-operative activists are well aware of co-operatives in other countries and draw on that knowledge, strong components of mainstream Japanese culture support cooperation, belonging and participation as well.

The interplay of these diverse currents underlying the development of a worker co-operative movement in Japan both strengthens and weakens this movement and its separate parts. Exploring and expanding into existing networks with which worker cooperative members are familiar and of which many are part, makes successful growth more likely within those networks as long as these “parent” movements themselves remain vibrant. But extension into populations not part of these movements, such as youth, has proven difficult.

Member experience of movement organizations accounts for many of the specific features (authority and decision making patterns, growth patterns, political orientation, recruitment, work organization) of these workers co-operatives, helping us understand why members of these different businesses govern themselves as they do within the general conception of “democratic self-management” and how they arrange their work “without a boss.” One particular consequence of these organizational pathways is a focus on the elderly rather than on the young, with whom alternatives to the status quo are so often associated. Another striking element is the important role of women more than men in many of these cooperatives, including their leadership. Still another is the broad focus on service rather than manufacturing or extraction (esp. farming, fishing and forestry, where co-operatives of various sorts have long been common and large in Japan) and especially an emphasis on food handling or preparation, and care giving.

This close association of worker co-operatives with a variety of specific social movements will also help us understand the directions in which the worker co-operative movement may go in the next few years. The future of some of these worker co-operatives will depend on the extent enthusiasm for and participation in these movements themselves wax and wane. For example, it is possible that women as part of an associated movement to promote their specific interests will no longer form a distinct segment of a worker co-operative movement if issues such as equal employment opportunity and tax law change in particular ways. Yet as Japan ages rapidly, attention and resources for issues even more difficult and more poignant for elderly women will increase.

This intimate connection with specific social movements circumscribes the range of diversity among Japan’s worker co-operatives in both origin and form. None of the worker co-operatives I have studied or heard of in Japan are isolated start-ups, nor have any been passed on to their workers collectively, something that happens occasionally in the US, for example at the publisher WW Norton. Failing businesses revived through worker buy-outs have used their unions to make it possible. Japanese worker co-operatives are linked to each other and to the movements in which they operate in a variety of ways, but in particular, because many if not all of their members are also themselves members of these movements and specific groups that constitute them . These men and women would probably not have started or joined worker co-operatives as mature adults if they had not already been members of other movement groups which made this possible, and planted the seed as an attractive possibility.

This connection to social movements has an effect on how these businesses are organized and run. Worker co-operatives face a variety of issues of governance that must be solved differently than in conventional businesses, large or small. In general, these worker owned and managed businesses criticize the regnant Japanese models of large and small businesses from the perspective of participatory democracy that emerges from the movements of which they are part – trade unionism, feminism, consumerism, co-operation, and environmentalism.

Each business or other organization in this loose worker co-op movement seems interested in and willing to work politically to get a national worker co-operative law, elusive thus far, which would recognize and accommodate their distinctive features. Among the effects of the effort to secure such a law, however, are that worker co-ops of all stripes appear as members of a single social movement with the appearance of substantial unity, and that their members make up an active and conspicuous part of other movements. This effort gives them all more reason to interact with mutual support, and increases their ability to do so, making them overall a more prominent part of the progressive activism landscape.

Table of Contents

Ch. 1 The Diversity of Worker Co-operatives

Introduction to the five worker co-operatives at which I worked, and the general situation of worker coops in Japan

-  hospital cleaning crew of 11, 55-75 year olds, part of Jigyödan

-  hot lunch delivery restaurant of 14 middle-aged women, with Seikatsu Club Seikyö

-  transport company, core of fired labor organizers in the transport industry

-  environmental technology engineering firm, once part of Toshiba

-  Köreikyö (Seniors Co-operative), combining consumer and worker co-op features, started with connection to Jigyödan members

Ch. 2 Worker Co-operatives and Modern Social Movements

Movements are tied to, and gave rise to, these worker coops, which in turn energize and connect these earlier movements to each other; we get a fuller and more accurate understanding of worker co-ops seeing them as part of networks rather than as isolated businesses; and we can use the relations to worker co-operatives to examine the ways such larger and diverse movements as the following fit into the wider society:

-  women

-  consumers and consumer coops

-  unions

-  ecology/environment

-  aging

-  volunteerism and NGOs

Ch. 3 Governing Democratic Workplaces

Formal internal organization and governance: ownership and office

-  practices and problems of equality, egalitarianism and participatory democracy

-  the roles of money, age, authority, reputation in the Japanese cultural tradition, in worker co-operatives

-  Japanese businesses, small and large, and the co-operative alternative

Ch. 4 Working Without a Boss

Informal organization and governance: work and solidarity

-  how do people work when they are their own, and each other’s, bosses in a business that has no bosses? Discussion of mechanisms and their effects as solutions to the central problem of worker co-operative operation, free-riding.

-  teams and teamwork

-  helping one another

-  client evaluations and feedback

-  meetings, endless meetings

Ch. 5 Can Worker Co-operatives Thrive in Japan?

Possible futures involving youth, women, workers, elderly, other kinds of co-operatives; efforts to get a national worker cooperative law; international developments among cooperatives and global economics

-  is there any possibility of getting many young people involved in worker co-operatives, when they are not part of any existing movements, and people who are part of existing movements are their parents’ - and grandparents’ - ages?

-  how would a law help worker co-operatives? would it hinder their operation? why is support so thin among politicians and political parties for a worker cooperative law?

-  Could any of these segments be co-opted by politics: are there policies and programs which, aimed at the movements behind these worker co-operatives, could “drain the swamp?”

-  This is a self-aware movement that devotes a lot of attention to how they are worker co-ops, and quite a bit of attention to the international co-operative movement, where many differences are found.

Chapter 1 The Diversity of Japan’s Worker Co-operatives

As many as 30,000 people now work cooperatively in Japan, a number that has been growing steadily since the 1970s. These worker co-operatives are concentrated in the Tokyo and Osaka-Kyoto regions, but can be found from Sapporo to Nagasaki. The Women’s Worker Cooperatives (12,000), the Japan Worker’s Cooperative Union (9000), the recently invented hybrid Senior Cooperatives (15,000 workers) -- a consumer/worker cooperative of, by and for those 55 and older -- and a congeries of independently organized worker co-operatives (3000 workers) from a variety of backgrounds, all play major roles in this movement. In the last quarter of the 20th century efforts to create worker-owned and democratically governed businesses in Japan began to emerge with the support of a wide variety of economic actors -- among them labor unions and union organizers, members and employees of consumer cooperatives, income-seeking housewives and their public supporters, the elderly, employees of small businesses, farmers and farm workers, employees of failing firms and maverick employees of large firms, and environmentalists. And as worker owned and managed businesses have increased in size and number, their awareness of each other and their common interest in alternative ways to organization production has also grown.

The pattern of the development and organization of Japan’s worker co-operatives has characteristics of a social movement: enthusiasm for the principles underlying one’s organization, a sense of participating in a growing group that will change the world for the better for (almost) everyone, a feeling of being (but just for the moment) outside the mainstream of society, a self-awareness of the effects and reach of one’s own practices. But even seen as a social movement, Japan’s worker co-operatives do not constitute a case of isolated simultaneous social invention, the culmination of a snowballing tradition, or the rapid, fade-like spread of a foreign institution. Rather, this recent development of diverse worker co-operatives in Japan can be best understood as part of, pushed along by, started through or in connection with, other contemporary social movements, namely

-  consumerism and consumer co-operatives

-  trade unions

-  ecology/environmental movement

-  women and equal opportunity, Japan’s feminism.

-  seniors movement

The convergence of all of these currents in complex patterns underlying the development of a worker co-operative movement in Japan is both a strength and weakness of this movement and its separate parts. Exploring and expanding into existing networks with which members are familiar makes successful growth more likely within those networks while those movements remain vibrant themselves, but penetration of populations not part of these movements becomes more difficult and less likely, and may make the separate currents of the movement dependent on the continued implicit support of allied movements. Especially, despite the fact that the labor market for recent graduates failed the young so terribly in the 1990’s and since, young people are not a significant part of the worker cooperative movement in Japan, as they in Europe and elsewhere. Member experience of the practices of movement organizations of which they are a part also explains many of the specific features of these workers co-operatives.