Bargaining the „Human Rights“ of „Human Resources“ – Unions and NGO-Networks Advocating Precarious Migrant Workers' Interests in Japan

Taking the debate concerning recent immigration policy changes, focusing on the so-called Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), as case study, this paper challenges popular generalizations about civil society and the labor movement in Japan. While civil society in Japan has often been portrayed as apolitical and service oriented, being strong in producing local “social capital” but weak in generating “advocacy” on the national level, the labor movement has been described as politically domesticated and oriented towards balancing interests of big companies and their core staff, organized in enterprise unions. As these generalizations are grounded for a great part of the scene, they still ask for qualification, because they obscure a relatively small but growing and significant portion of organization of and bargaining for workers interests in Japan. Irregular employment and migrant labor is especially prominent in Japan’s many small and medium sized enterprises (SME). The unionization of employees in SME through individual membership unions, that has been fostered in the 1970 by the former national union center Sôhyô, has since the 1990s formed the basis for migrant and irregular workers organization in unions in Japan, and as further become the core of new constellations and alliances in civil society, which played an active role in discussions leading to immigration policy reforms. Thus it was not the Japanese civil code or the so-called NPO-law, but the Labor Standards Act (LSA) and the Labor Union Act (LUA), which formed the legal framework for a vibrant civil society in Japan, by providing rights of organization and collective bargaining for precarious migrant workers, and thus enabled political advocacy.