Our Unions, Our Selves: The Rise of Feminist Labor Unions in Japan by Anne Zacharias-Walsh

Author:Anne Zacharias-Walsh [Zacharias-Walsh, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Labor & Industrial Relations, Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, History, Asia, Japan
ISBN: 9781501703041
Google: f4oEkAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 30454974
Publisher: ILR Press
Published: 2016-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

6

CRISIS OF DIFFERENCE

The Japanese women wasted no time in making good on their plans to share what they’d learned in the Detroit meetings. The WUT held its first satellite meeting in mid-October. Those who had participated in the Detroit meeting gave summaries of the US participants’ presentations, with particular emphasis on Dorothy Sue Cobble’s talk on the history of labor feminism in the United States, and Tess Ewing’s and Emily Rosenberg’s presentations on labor education. Longtime WUT member Miyako Ōga, who gave a presentation on Cobble’s talk, told me before the meeting that some of the women had been so excited by Cobble’s discussion of US labor feminism that they ordered her book, The Other Women’s Movement, hoping that they would be able to read it with the help of computer translation programs. They quickly found out their denshi jisho (electronic dictionaries) didn’t have the muscle to keep up with an academic’s vocabulary, Ōga told me with a laugh. But the women were still happy with their purchase because the big, meaty book of working women’s accomplishments is still an inspiration and a reminder of the energy they felt as they listened to Cobble’s talk. They also studied the presentations by 9to5, the UE, and UNITE HERE Local 34 because those organizations are similar to the WUT in goals and values yet have been more successful in addressing high turnover rates and stimulating membership participation. Similar meetings were held in Fukuoka, Hokkaido, and Osaka to share what they learned in Workshop I, to spread the word about the US-Japan Working Women’s Network Project, and to invite others to join us in our goal of developing a membership skills education program for Japanese women’s unions.

In November and again in March, representatives from the expanding pool of participating women’s organizations met at Waseda University in Tokyo for a national two-day seminar to begin choosing the topics for their first three educational modules. Like the regional meetings, the Waseda meeting was run entirely by the Japanese activists. I was invited to attend as a participant and to answer any logistical or substantive questions about the project that might arise. My primary role, however, was to relay the Japanese women’s conclusions back to the US labor educators who would custom design sample modules that they would then present at Workshop II.

Prior to the November meeting, the Japanese groups had agreed that Workshop II should consist of three, small group skills-development workshops, one of which should focus on organizing skills. Our tasks for the two national meetings were to choose the other two skill areas we would focus on, and then begin the process of specifying exactly what the content for the three small group workshops should include. To keep the process democratic and to help avoid culturally based assumptions, the Japanese women held brainstorming sessions to give everyone a chance to share their ideas about what each skills module should include and accomplish. For example, the women brainstormed endings to the sentence: “We want our organizing module to .

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