The Spring Offensive, an annual campaign in which trade unions across Japan come together to raise joint demands, has been a fixture of the country’s organized labor movement for decades. But its influence has been waning recently, as the voices of increasingly numerous “nonregular” workers — those on part-time and temporary contracts — have historically been excluded.
But this year, the Spring Offensive focused on nonregular workers, who now account for nearly 40 percent of the Japanese workforce but have largely been ignored by Japan’s established trade unions. This year’s Spring Offensive gathered sixteen different unions across the nation to call for a collective wage increase for nonregular workers.
A daylong series of rallies on March 10 saw organizers marching to different workplaces to show solidarity with each other’s bargaining campaigns, from foreign language schools to a local restaurant chain. This mobilization marks the first organized nationwide coordination of nonregular workers in Japan. At least one of these companies, ABC Mart, a popular shoe-store chain, responded with a 6 percent wage increase for more than 4,600 nonregular workers it employs.
Jacobin contributor Promise Li talked to a range of participants from Tokyo to Kyoto in this year’s Spring Offensive to learn more about the campaign: Kotaro Aoki, a trade unionist in Tokyo and key organizer of this year’s Spring Offensive; Nana Iwamoto, a student labor activist in Tokyo volunteering at labor...
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