Abstract
In this article, I discuss how the family activities of automobile manufacturing workers from Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) are influenced by the transformation of production projects. Because of the poor economic situation of the 1990s in Japan, the automobile manufacturing section at Toyota put a system of time management into force as a part of its restructuring programme. After the time management system had been enforced, the family activities and gender divisions in households of the manufacturing workers in this section changed to a certain extent. Here, for the methodology, I use the project concept from‘time geography’based on time-space budgeted data, and try to examine the relations between the production project and family projects.
In the second section of this paper, I explain the production project by Toyota and its transformation. The production project strongly influences the activities of the workers. During working hours, the workers are constrained by severe coupling with the production line. Moreover, the daily paths of the workers are determined by the persistence of holiday working, shift changes, and overtime work as an aspect of human resource flexibility within the Toyota production system. During the period of Japanese high-growth, Toyota centrally determined the workers day and night shift system (day shift 8:00∼17:00, night shift 21:00∼6:00) and overtime work. In recent years, the need for cost reduction and improvements in employment efficiency were required due to the change of economic trends in the international market and to changes in Japanese society. This situation caused the appearance of another working pattern, such as the sequential two shift system (1st shift 6:30∼15:15, 2nd shift 16:15∼1:00).
In the third section of this paper, I clarify the sharing activities of the workers in the family project. For the sharing activities, I chose the meal activities and going-out activities of family members. The activity patterns of wife and husband match in the day shift and reverses in the night shift. This pattern changes week by week. It is thought of as continuous activity, most of the worker's families take their meal together in the evening despite this weekly cycle. It remains, however, that the going-out activities are rarely done by them together. It seems that the production project is a significant factor of constraint for the husband doing any activities other than working. Because of the transformation to the sequential two shift system, the activity patterns of wife and husband do not match anymore and so they have a difficulty even in sharing the meal together. However, the husbands have joined shopping activities with their families.
In the fourth section of this article, I discuss the division of household activities of the workers in the family project. For instance, I chose some pickup and send-off activities for their children and I tried to explain the change of gender division of household activities. When the day and night shift system was in place it was impossible the for wife and husband to share the household activities and childcare. Therefore, the wife had to do all the household activities. However, after the sequential two shift system was introduced, husbands began to do household activities such as pickup and send-off activities for their children. Thus, the changes of gender division of household activities became evident. As a consequence, the flexibility of the production project was weakened in daily scale but that of the family project was increased.
