Brief History about the Japanese HRM:

 

Japanese manufacturing firms, especially automobile makers, electrical appliance makers, electric equipment manufactures, and precision machinery industries enjoyed a world wide competitive advantage for three decades from the early 1960s to the 1980s. However, after the bursting of the nation’s asset inflation ‘economic bubble’ in the beginning of 1990s, Japanese firms lost their competitive edge. In concurrence with the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy, the Japanese style of management that foreign managers or researchers had revered lost popularity. Subsequently, Japanese firms have been struggling to reengineer their HRM systems.

3 PILLARs OF JAPANESE HRM SYSTEM: It is really important to briefly introduce about the “three pillars” of the Japanese Human Resource Management system before exploring about the main impacts of the decade-long recession and also the discussing whether changes in Japanese HRM system are following a Western model or they have their own strategy For their employment, training and also industrial relation and compensation systems.

The key and main 3 pillers of Japanese consist of

• Enterprise or Trade &Labor unionism  which is the system that each firm possesses a single union to stand for blue- and white-collar workers; and these unions operate independently. The purpose of establishing a union is, together with the management of the firm, to work for the interests of the enterprise. The enterprise unionism aims to negotiate for increases in salaries and other allowances for workers (Grainger and Miyamoto 2003), and then they can encourage workers to increase the productivity and efficiency as well as to assure the future of a firm.


•  The second and another important HRM piller is Long-term or Life time employment. in Japan life time employment can be explain which is  politically correct than lifetime employment or. Employes  who are offered life-time employment are very important members or people in main activities of a firm .A research of Japanes Labour shows that more then 55%* of Japanese companies are still observing some form of the employment system and 14%* actively use it as a recruiting & retention tool. (Source: Labor Situation in Japan & Analysis: Detailed Exposition 2009/2010, JILPT Presented at The 8 th Annual Asian Shares Services & Outsourcing for HR Conference, 22-25 March 2010, Amara Hotel, Singapore ). the major advantage of life-time employment system is to build up the loyalty of core employees and rationalise a firm’s investment in job training.


• The seniority based wage and promotion system, a third pillar of the Japanese HRM system, is described that when being recruited, the salary of a worker starts at the bottom and will increase if he can stay longer with the firm (Ojha 2000). This system prevents job switching because workers have to start at the bottom level again. On the other hand, firms have to keep their skill employees to reduce the training cost, and also retain senior members to let them not find another job on their own because respecting of seniority is coherent with Japanese tradition and culture.

Japanese Industrial Relations from an International Perspective