My Research Interests

Akira Suzuki
Associate Professor, The Ohara Institute for Social Research, Hosei University



One of my main research topics is how to revitalize the Japanese labor movement. To explore this topic, I first did research on internal politics of the enterprise union of one of the major steel companies and analyzed how the union’s policy orientations changed from militant to moderate ones in the late 1950s and 1960s. I found out that enterprise unions of export-oriented industries such as steel came under the strong influence of those union leaders who identified workers’ interests with those of the company and excluded those union officials critical of cooperative industrial relations from the union leadership. These unions became firmly embedded in cooperative labor-management relations and lost their capability to revive militancy, even if such a union policy was required by changes in economic and political environments. I wrote about this “irreversible” process of policy moderation of Japanese enterprise unions in my dissertation (1997), an article in Social Science Japan Journal ("The Transformation of Visions of Labor Unionism") (2000), and in the paper presented to the Contemporary Japan Group, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo (2000).

Finding out that the revitalization of enterprise unions “from within” was virtually impossible, I then turned to the issue of how labor unions were coping with the declining union density and how they are organizing new members. Since the mid-1990s, the union membership and union density have rapidly declined, which reduced the political and social influence of the labor movement as a whole. I thought that the efforts to reverse the declining union membership and density by allocating more monetary and human resources to organizing was another form of union revitalization. In preparation for conducting research on Japanese unions’ organizing efforts, I did an extensive literature survey on previous studies on union organizing published in English, and wrote a review article (2004), in which I identified three main types of organizing strategies: organizing model, partnership model, and service model. Under the auspices of the Ohara Institute, I formed a research group with other labor scholars on union organizing, and we conducted interviews with union officials and organizers of national confederations, industry-level federations and some enterprise unions. A part of interviews were published as the Ohara Institute’s working papers, and the research group published a volume Rodo Kuniai no Sochiki Kakudai Senryaku [Organizing Strategies of Labor Unions] in 2006. I was one of the editors of the volume and wrote two chapters: one chapter was about the history of organizing activities by the two rival national confederations from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, and another chapter analyzed and explained differences of organizing strategies between the six industry-level federations. The draft of the latter analytical chapter was presented as a conference paper at IIRA 5th Asian Regional Congress (2004).

I then turned to another form of union revitalization, social movement unionism. I became aware of the importance of social movement unionism when I read studies on the organizing efforts based on organizing model in the literature review of union organizing. In this model, labor unions not only mobilize rank-and-file members, but also form coalitions with social movement organizations in union organizing. Since many Japanese labor scholars were not familiar with the concept of social movement unionism, I organized a special issue on this topic in the Journal of Ohara Institute for Social Research in 2005 to introduce this concept. I commissioned three labor scholars to write articles on a historical analysis and case studies of social movement unionism in the U.S., South Korea, and Japan. I wrote an introductory article to the special issue, based on a literature survey on previous studies on social movement unionism published in English. In this article, I identified three main characteristics of social movement unionism: re-definition of labor movements’ purposes so that they pursue broader issues such as economic justice for working people in general, alliance-formation between labor unions and social movement organizations, and reforms of union organization in order to promote internal democracy.

Currently, I am doing research on community unionism, one of the specific forms of social movement unionism. I understand community unionism as region-based labor movements that actively seek coalitions with community-based groups not only on union-related issues but community-related ones. As a specific example of community unionism, I turned my attention to AFL-CIO’s central labor councils and conducted interviews with officials and activists of three CLCs in Massachusetts in 2006 and published a study comparing these CLCs and two regional labor councils (equivalents of CLCs in Japan) in 2007 ("Chiiki Rodo Undo no Nichibei Hiakau: Chiho Rodo Hyogikai to Chikuro/Chiku Rengokai no Jirei ni motoduite." [A comparative study of region-based labor movements between the U.S. and Japan: based on the cases of AFL-CIO’s central labor councils and regional labor councils in Japan]) in Konodai Keizai Kenkyu). One of the differences between the U.S. and Japanese cases, I found, was that the coalition-building between unions and community-based organizations was much more active in the U.S. than in Japan. To explore the reasons for the difference, I am now doing more in-depth research on Japanese region-based unions such as “community unions” and regional labor councils. It is my hunch that the different levels of the coalition-building between the two countries are influenced by the state of civil society in each country.

January 2008