‘For women, by women’: women-only unions in Japan

Abstract

Low rates of union membership and lack of representation on union committees for women in contemporary union structures in Japan disguise the contributions women have made to the union movement. In exploring the development of women-only unions in Japan and the role they fulfil as women-only organizations, I argue that enterprise unions are exclusive and their weakened position vis-à-vis employers and the state combined with the androcentrism of their policies and practices have resulted in their failure to provide adequate and effective representation for women. It is therefore not surprising that women have created separate structures, including women-only unions, to address issues that existing unions have failed to address and to provide alternative forms of representation for women workers who are not organized by existing unions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.