Interest groups and labor unions. What role do they play?
Don't forget to hit the SUBSCRIBE button below!
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Japanese Politics 101. In this series we talk
about the hierarchy of components that make up Japanese politics. We started, for
viewers that have been watching all along, with the Emperor and we've been
going down to different pieces. Today we're gonna talk about special interest
groups, in fact, interest groups that have some political weight and use that weight
in effecting change in Japanese politics, Michael.
There's a need to talk about the
ways that legislation and regulation get manipulated. And because they are
manipulated, there are people who can work outside of what is normally seen as
the citizen and representative framework. Those interest groups that are able to
take their agenda and make it the government's agenda,
I mean, they come in various forms: some are real citizens groups that get
together in civil society, organizations environmental groups, health welfare
groups; but then, there are people who do it and are in it as a business.
Right. It has a bit of a bad color. I mean, if you say lobbyists in this context
people immediately think of the bad part about, you know, handcuffs and in
bags of money, and people in sunglasses and that sort of thing. But actually,
these interest groups are an essential component of a regular normally
operating democracy.
And in the case of Japan, the very largest organized
interest groups are necessary for the actual production of much of the
legislation and regulation that happens. Basically, very large interest groups,
let's start with the business lobbyists: the Nippon Keidanren, the Keizai Doyukai -
that's the Japan Business Federation and the Japan *Association for Corporate Executives -
and then finally the Japan Chamber of Commerce - the JCCI.
They have resources, they have people, they have branches all over Japan
and all over the world, in the case of the JCCI,
that are just absolute sponges for information about the country and all
the wishes and the desires of Japan's corporations. And the three different
groups each has its own flavor: Keidanren is big business because it's
about 1,400 big business corporations as members. The Keizai Doyukai is sort of
the reformist liberal lefty group because its executives who are
interested in governance issues. And then, the JCCI is the grubby "shoutengai" (shopping district)
with over a million member organization that just pushes, you
know, for lower taxes and the simple things. Each of them
has its own desires and its own flavour of business lobby. So, Japan has
a really well developed business lobbying situation. Now contrast that to
what in most countries exists in terms of the
workers. And so, the management is well represented
but then there's the workers and the story is different.
So, typically in a lot of countries, not just the United States or in in many
European countries, when you have for example a trade union, that union
broaches different industries for people who do a similar job, so they might be
mechanics or there might be nurses or something like that, and in Japan the
story is completely different.
Yeah and it's very much a vertical situation:
a single company, a single union enterprise unions.
Everybody's thrown into
the same the same union.
Since they're
in a single company, they really think about the company's profits and losses.
The union representatives and are very much in tune with management
because they don't have these horizontal connections that trade unions
have in most countries. What happens is they do get connected but it's only at
the very top. And that's in an organization called Rengo. It's
the Confederation for Trade Unions but they're very honest. If you go to their
their webpage, they have a description of themselves
and they're extremely critical about their own diversity and their own
membership. They say we are not the people who represent the Japanese worker
by any means and they have these wonderful pie charts and they show how
we represent only a small slice of the workers.
Makes me want to join them.
But, there's a really thrilling honesty in at least
the labor lobbyists of Rengo. They're completely honest about how few
actual workers and how monochromatic their workers are. Mostly
from companies that employ more than 300 people, mostly men, almost entirely
full timers: they're career people and the white color salary man
and then the blue color salary men. And that's only a small slice of the
Japan working populace; they're very honest about that. So
you have on the business side a very wide-ranging multi-level, multi-
size set of lobbying organizations, each of them popping into the government with
ideas. And we'll go into how they do that.
But it's not this rotating
door that you have in some countries?
Absolutely not, because
there's no rotating door, once you leave the bureaucracy, you stay out.
Occasionally you can somehow be reappointed but that's a microscopic
number of people who actually once they leave the career bureaucracy. And
it's a career bureaucracy, it's a pyramid of people
marching up together. There's little influence in terms of personnel. In terms
of ideas though, each ministry has, and the Prime Minister has, Shingi-kai - the
advisory councils - and that is where the the rubber meets the road.
Because in the old days in the LDP, there were all of the divisions in the
Policy Research Council and the Policy Research Council was the
kitchen in which the future legislation of Japan would get
cooked and that's where the lobbyists would go: they would meet the LDP
representatives and those LDP representatives would then go and meet
the ministry officials, of about their same age, and they'd form the Iron
Triangle everyone is familiar with between bureaucrats, lobbyists and
of members of the Diet.
And that's why this usurpation of power idea began.
That's right. And Karel van Wolferen and all these people,
Clyde Prestowitz, all had this revisionist view that
this is the way it's always going to be. It's not that way anymore. Now, the
the Policy Research Council in the LDP is nearly moribund: it has a very
little effect. Instead, it's the shingi-kai in the ministries, the
advisory councils that are attached to give advice to the ministries, and more
importantly, Abe has been absolutely proliferating the councils that he
has, left and right for every issue, he has all these advisers.
And normal people
are sometimes invited to participate, you know, like me and you.
Even
non-Japanese are on these advisory councils,
Corey Feldman is on so many of them.
He's sort of the foreigner who get named to a lot of them, but there are others as
as well, and so there are non-Japanese,
academics, sometimes, rarely journalists, and for labor issues, labor union people,
and business lobbyists. And they become the little kitchens that cook up
the legislation or the new regulations for a ministry and that's fed
into the system. That's where the action is and that's, you know, where
the lobbyists are. If you want to talk about lobbyists in a positive way, that's where
they get their juice.
But getting back to the
labor unions themselves, they're in silos within companies,
in fact, have their own trade union.
Every company has its labor union.
And the people who are running the Union are also employees of the company.
That's right and they are not management but the senior members definitely
are. Now, the labor unions, you know, first of all, politically, they have a
death wish: they have always supported opposition
parties. They have never come around and said "hey the LDP is going to be the next
government. We better have some better say!"
We have to vote for the losers. that happened, you know, when they
were behind the Socialist Party: they were the
people who put the posters up for that DPJ, no matter, you know, whether the DPJ
was really happy to be so closely aligned with labor.
We need ground troops, now they're hanging around with the
DPP, the breakup party that came out of the wreckage of the DPJ but that party
is going to get slaughtered in July.
They're looking for anything that will that will boost them, but they do have an
offensive weapon that they use every year and that is Shinto.
So every year they gather their forces and they onslaught.
Yeah and get raises
of 1,500 to 3,000 yen per month.
Not very successful so far.
--$12 to $28 a month more for the employees.
So what you're saying is over
the last couple of years the Shinto has produced maybe a 2% raise while thew
while the cost of living has gone up 4-6%.
It's an insult, you know,
here this is enough for, you know, 3 bento lunches. Enjoy, that's your
raise. What are you talking about?
In the meantime, the corporates are
beginning to amass much more profit.
They have a mountain of money in the
bank and, credit to the Abe administration, they have been from day one been saying that
if we're going to get Abenomics, if we are going to have
the positive perpetuating cycle, there is one step that has to happen and
that is the profits. Originally, they came from the devaluation of the currency,
I'm sorry, I didn't use that word. The expansion of the monetary base
from the devaluation, the corporates got a huge profit rise and
they've been very profitable since. Those profits just gets stuck right in the
corporate executive suite and this get siphoned off right into the banking
system, where that's not where they're supposed to go. They're supposed to go to
the workers, to the wages ,and the Abe administration has been furious
behind the scenes with Keidanren representatives, in particular, saying
"when is it you people are gonna cough up the cash? When are you going to do it?" And
sometimes it's not even private. I always have a beef with Minister Seko
of Economics, Trade and Industry but he has just been hammering away at the
corporates saying "you people are the reason why it's not working!"
Well there's
this unspoken promise though that we're not going to tell you what to do, right?
The government has pretty much stated, we'll complain and stuff like that,
but we're not going to tell you what to do.
Yeah, we're not gonna force you: it's a
voluntary thing.
Which is funny because in other issues they do, right? But this
is pretty important.
Yes. It's extremely important for the Abenomics
idea to work at which it hasn't, as it's supposed to. It's been jerry-rigged
thanks to the work of the Bank of Japan. The BOJ's constant expansion of its
book is the reason why this whole thing has not fallen apart, but not even the
government, it seems, has power over the lobbyists,
has power over the corporations to say "look this was the deal: we make life
better for you; you make life better for everybody else". That's not been an
effective relationship. This conversation, Michael, wouldn't be complete unless we
talked about those special interest groups that also have a deleterious
effect on the Japanese economy or society.
Are you talking about the labor
unions internal management?
No, I'm not talking that.
What I'm talking about are those interest groups that are unrepresented
numerically, but whose impact on the culture, perhaps, or society or on
politics is is too overblown. For example, J.A. Or for example...
Is there really anything else that you could do talking about Nokyo - Japan
Agriculture. Japanese farmers are a sliver of employment maybe 1% 2% of all
employment in Japan; definitely a sliver of GDP 1% 2% of GDP and yet Nokyo
and it's lobbying arm. Still even after it was supposedly decapitated
by Abe, right when he says "we're gonna; we're going to take away many of
their sources of power. It's hard for
the LDP to not love the agricultural vote. They have a lot of the
same values, one of which is they like, the members of the LDP and Nokyo, both
love the fact that there is disproportionality between rural and
urban votes: they both are on the same page with that. They're also both
extremely conservative and they also like things the way they are. They
really are not going for any huge break or any kind of transformation.
Now, Mr. Abe, in talking about abenomics, has tried to transform
agriculture from something, that is a negative in many people's eyes. Seeing
that most Japanese live in urban areas. they see Nokyo as basically a
parasitic organism that doesn't really represent the farmers: it basically
represents itself and it basically represents the status quo at all times.
They don't see that as a future industry but Mr. Abe is constantly
talking and even though the eventual impact of GDP will be
unmeasurable, and we have to talk about that too, but unmeasurable in terms of
the change that will happen if he talks always about modern agricultural
techniques, modern marketing. "How delicious Japanese rice is. The world
loves Japanese Shochu!" Yes, but who is that serving?
It's serving a very small slice of Japanese life.
Well people are knocking
on the door. The EU and Japan have just signed a free trade agreement (EPA),
President Trump is also hammering on agriculture and I imagine he's not going
to give up until there is some movement.
Well, we should, before we leave, say
a few things about how unrepresentative these interest groups are. Interest
groups are often criticized for not being elected democracies themselves and
yet portraying themselves as representing the people, you know.
We are a loud voice, we have the PR departments, we have
our issue which is more important than anybody else's issues, and that these are
actually tyrannical usually extremely narrowly based organizations that
internally usually have terrible governance but they
throw their weight around. And this is certainly, you know,
that's a reasonable criticism. Even in the Japanese case, even with large
membership organizations, it really often comes down to the individual who's
in charge. The current head of the Keidanren is not nearly as tyrannical as the one
before him. We'll see how that's going to work out
in terms of internationalisation.
But he is young, isn't he? Well, the funny thing is the whole
board of Keidanren and to be elected to Keidanren at the board
level, your company has had to have been in existence, I don't think that's a rule,
but the standard is they've already been in existence for more than a hundred years.
Yeah, that's in fact what happened in the last vice
president's nomination process. All of the companies that were
represented were century-old tottering giants, whatever you
want to call them. Yeah, it's Japan Inc. in the Keidanren; that's not
the case in the Keizai Doyukai; it's not the case in the JCCI.
So I think, Michael, what this highlights is that the current standard
of lobbying for special interest groups is going through a bit of a transition:
people are unsatisfied and unhappy without having their voices represented
by these monoliths and perhaps it's a new world of having lobbying and
lobbying activities in a social society more set up. I mean, the number of NGOs
and NPOs have proliferate throughout the country.
We'll
see how it goes. It's a fluctuating mix; I don't think that the
NPOs and the NGOs are set up specifically for lobbying; that's one of
the things they can do, but I think they've been rather unsuccessful and I
think the NPO NGO era globally is in decline. They're simply not able to
ratchet up their power and the whaling issue is one where it shows that the
NGOs like Greenpeace were not able to embarrass Japan sufficiently to not
withdraw from the IWC, the International Whaling Commission. So I'm sort of with
you but I'm not entirely convinced.
The role of lobbying groups and special
interest groups in the whole complex of Japanese politics is intensely
interesting. We're going to continue to develop this. Please stay tuned.
Hi everyone, thanks for watching this last episode. Please don't forget to hit
like, SUBSCRIBE, and help us proliferate this channel !
For more infomation >> 《小女花不弃》柳青芜对陈煜下毒，花不弃看到两人做一件事，泪崩 - Duration: 3:37. 
For more infomation >> slovenský colník pýta 20 eur na kávičku/словацький платник попросить 20 євро за каву - Duration: 2:47. 
For more infomation >> Comment dessiner "Un été sans maman", la leçon de dessin de Gregory Panaccionne - Duration: 2:33. 
For more infomation >> ИСТИННАЯ СИЛА КАКАШИ ХАТАКЕ| боруто 93 серия - Duration: 4:49. 
For more infomation >> #SeaOfThieves #ApexLegends #Chillstream #Hangout #Chat - Duration: 8:53:32. 
For more infomation >> 9.Grandfather´s destiny - Duration: 2:30. 
For more infomation >> 同是转型的LPL选手，小孩B级，姿态A级，S的他公认世界第一 - Duration: 4:04. 
For more infomation >> 吉利又出新车，配全幅式玻璃天幕，别再等特斯拉Model 3了 - Duration: 7:17. 
For more infomation >> Comment j'ai dessiné "No war", la leçon de dessin d'Anthony Pastor - Duration: 2:21. 
For more infomation >> Mercedes-Benz CLA-Klasse CLA 180 d Coupé Business Solution - Duration: 1:12. 
For more infomation >> 너프전쟁 : 사과대전 // 코너 Korner - Duration: 3:45. 
No comments:
Post a Comment