Comparative Studies of Long Term Employment in the Japanese and the US large firms : A Comparative Historical Analysis of Employment Management

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In this research, the investigator pursued historical studies of the employment practices of the large size firms, particularly in the following three areas.(1)An analysis of the long term employment fluctuation data of the large firms in the US and Japan : As a result of the analysis of the long term employment data from 1950s to 1990s, these three significant facts are founded. (1)Even in the Japanese large manufacturing firms, which were considered to have stronger orientation for the job security than the US counterparts, there took place many reductions in the amount of employment within a relatively short time period. Of course the occasions of employment reduction were far more frequent for the US firms. (2)Both Japanese and the US firms the changes in the total number of employees had a meaningful correlation to the fluctuations of the amount of sales (out put), not to earnings. This fact asks us to review the preset prevailing understanding about this relationship, like ‘two-c … More onsecutive years' effect. (3)Generally speaking, compared to the Japanese firms, the US firms' employment seems to have been more sensitive to the changes in the amount of the sales.(2)The historical analysis of the formation process of the seniority in the US manufacturing firms shows the seniority rules originally came, not from the union practices, but from the management labor policies and the employment practices in the non-union era of 1920s. The seniority rules became more formal and clear ones in the 1940s and 1950s. Not only union activities, but also the employment commitment played important roles in this process. The seniority rules in the US manufacturing workplace, which enabled the long term employment for the male blue collar workers, has a somewhat common features with Japanese firms' life long employment in the meaning that the rules were build on the interactive commitment of the management and the union. This poses the researchers the importance of searching the meaning of the long term commitment both for the management and labor.(3)The third are is on ongoing changes in the HRM and employment relationship in the US and the impact of this changes on the industrial relations. From the mid 1980s, the drastic restructurings and HRM reforms took places in the US. Increasing use of atypical employment and the spread of new pay system based on the performance evaluation brought serious impact on the traditional employment relationship and industrial relations. These outcomes pose important lessons for one who predicting the future results of the HRM reforms and the labor market deregulations in Japan. Less