高度経済成長期の職場管理と人事処遇制度

―リーディング・インダストリーとしての鉄鋼産業の分析から―

抄録

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between blue-collar workers' personnel management systems and workplace management in the high growth era. We deal with the case of major steel companies as an example, especially Yawata Steel and Nippon Steel that had strongly impacted on labor management in Japan.
Previous studies explain that the competitiveness of Japanese firms, especially prior to the “bubble economy”, was based on high “workplace level” skills, i.e., high blue-collar worker skill levels. They make much of competency-based pay (noryoku-kyu) and the ability-based grading system (shokuno-shikaku-seido) because they effectively encouraged employee skill development. Prior research states that these systems had been introduced in the latter half of 1960's. In contrast, the introduction of job-based wages (shokumu-kyu) using job analysis and job evaluation, adopted by the 1960s and called “American-style management” by researchers, has been regarded as a failure because it did not match Japanese workers' values and did not raise worker ability levels. Recently, however, some articles point out that job-based workplace management played an important role in rationalizing workplaces. So we would need to integrate our understanding of the two views.
The content of this paper is as follows. Until the 1960's, shopfloor workers could not take on the responsibility of process control because of their low abilities and weak work consciousness. At the same time, it was difficult for managers to carry out efficient shopfloor management because they did not understand actual work conditions. In this situation, job analysis and job evaluation furnished administrators with the methods of rationalization and personnel management. In the mid-1970's, blue-collar workers came to acquire highlevel skills, such as industrial engineering, so they played an important role in supervising shopfloor work. In conclusion, managers of the two companies chose sound strategies. We should acknowledge the strength of their business judgment from a contemporary perspective.