Abstract
In the Japanese history of labor, the historical fact that “the skilled worker has not materialized as a social category” often attracted attention to explain why laborers were not moving from one company to another in heavy industry after World War I. This historical fact has mainly been explained by technical factors or historical factors of the continuity of laborer groups from pre-modern society. However, these explanations did not clarify theoretically how the abovementioned factors work in fact on the institutional level of the labor-management relation, which were developed by the people of those days. In this paper, I take the Ironworkers Union as an example to explain how the various components of this particular organization had expressed what, I termed, 'active consciousness' for technology and the social position of laborer groups. In particular, I concentrate on the labor dispute, which broke out at the Japanese Railway Company, in which laborers stressed that their skills did relate to their status as members in the company. In the process, I demonstrate the kind of political consent, which was formed between the interest of operating the organization, and the interest of the skilled individuals.
