Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

A JAPANESE FIRM IN MALAYSIA 117
to understand the career strategies and aspirations of the Malaysian managerial
class. Hence it is briefly explained below.
In its barest form the Japanese management paradigm consists of ‘Three
Pillars’: lifetime employment (shushinkoyo); a seniority principle in wages and
promotions (nenko joretsu); and enterprise unionism (kigyobetsu kumiai). Lifetime
employment refers to the informal compact between the company and its
employees that the latter have a job for the whole of their careers and will not be
retrenched in the face of a recession until all other measures have been tried by the
company. In return for this job security, employees are expected to give loyal and
productive service. Companies recruit employees directly from secondary school
or university. They recruit them for their general education rather than for any
special skills or trade certificates they possess, because the company trains them in
its own corporate values and work practices as well as in technical matters relating
to the goods or services it produces.
According to the seniority principle in wages and promotions, a significant
component of an employee’s wage is determined by the length of his or her service
in the company. A wage rise gives workers a periodic reassurance that they are
being compensated for their loyalty to the company and that they are making
progress in their careers. If an employee were to leave and be re-employed in
another company, he or she would start again at the bottom of the wage scale.
This would entail little sacrifice early in a person’s career, but would involve a
considerable financial loss if they were to leave later on.
Enterprise unionism is a system whereby membership in the union is purely on
the basis of being an employee of that company. Such a union includes all blue-and
white-collar regular employees of non-managerial status in the company in all
factories or offices around Japan. It also includes employees posted to overseas
subsidiaries or joint ventures, even though those employees may have managerial
status while they are away from Japan. Workers are thus organised in the first
instance into vertical lines of allegiance to their own company rather than on a
cross-cutting horizontal class basis. Hence the interests of workers in the
enterprise union are directly bound up with the fortunes of the company in the long
term. Given workers’ individual expectations of lifetime employment, this long-term
perspective is reinforced. Since membership in the union is based on the fact of
employment only, not in the context of a specific craft, there are no demarcation
lines except those drawn by the company for its own functional convenience.
There can be no disputes with the union on this score and this allows the company
to deploy workers freely around the workplace to perform diverse jobs at
management’s convenience. 14
Thus lifetime employment, the seniority system and enterprise unionism are
mutually reinforcing aspects of an integrated system. The system was most
evident in practice in the boom years of the Japanese economy in the 1970s and
1980s, when it applied only to a quarter of the total Japanese labour force (nearly all
of them are males), who were regular employees in the large companies
(daikigyo). The success of its application was made possible by the existence of a