養成工と高校卒ブルーカラーの代替と補完 : 戦後日本の高度成長期を中心に(大会報告,2013年度政治経済学・経済史学会秋季学術大会共通論題「職業能力と教育-経済史と教育学の対話-」)

抄録

This article aims to clarify the ways in which yoseiko and high-school graduate workers were "substitutable" and "complementary" with each other during Japan's high-growth era of the mid-1950s to early 1970s, and to explain why this relationship developed. "Yoseiko" in this article are defined as "junior-high school graduates undergoing training in corporate apprenticeship schools and those who had already completed 3 or 4 years of such training." In particular, I address the following questions: (1) Why did high-school graduate workers take the place of yoseiko in the steel industry? (2) Why did junior-high school graduates continue to be trained as yoseiko in the automotive industry? According to the personnel management officers of Yawata Iron & Steel, Kobe Steel, and NKK, the three companies began to employ high school graduates to work with new technology, equipment and machinery in the late 1950s and 1960s, whereupon they stopped training junior-high school graduates and shut down the apprenticeship schools. In other words, the adoption of new technology, equipment and machinery decreased the value and need for the highly skilled manual laborers on whom the companies had hitherto relied, causing the steel companies to substitute high-school graduate workers for yoseiko. At this stage, there was "substitutability" between yoseiko and high school graduate workers in the steel industry. During the same period, however, Toyota Motor and DENSO continued to employ yoseiko and to train them to become highly skilled workers. According to the assignment data of Toyota Motor and DENSO, yoseiko were assigned to the machine tool, prototype development, and maintenance sections, while other workers, including high school graduates, worked on factory production lines. That is, Toyota Motor and DENSO placed a high value on skilled workers and practiced a division of labor in their companies. In other words, yoseiko and high-school graduate workers played complementary roles in the automotive industry. This paper demonstrates that the relative value and need for highly skilled workers is responsible for the "substitutability" between yoseiko and high-school graduate workers in the steel industry and their "complementarity" in the automotive industry in Japan's high-growth era.