Managing Labour in Japan

DN The Japanese system of production has intensified the exploitation of the worker. Japanese capital has been able to get more out of the worker than the Ford-Thylor system of assembly line production which had been the basis of American industrial supremacy in an earlier age MANAGEMENT and labour relations are hardly the stuff of which one would expect nationalist myths to be fabricated. But that is exactly what has happened in the case of Japan. According to Ishihara a "Japanese work ethic" is the reason why Japanese companies outperform their US counterparts. Or, again, "In Japan there is no open discrimination on the basis of position, class (everyone knows the word but the post-war generation has no feeling for what it really means), or income" [The Japan Thai Can Say Not 1991, p 82].