The Formation of the “Family Wage” Concept

: Labor-Management Negotiations Following the Human Rights Strike at Omi Kenshi Spinning Company

Abstract

In this paper, we use written documents and oral histories to analyze the discourse on the wage system that took place immediately after the human rights strike at Omi Kenshi Spinning Company in 1954. The Omi Kenshi strike serves here as a representative Japanese dispute of the 1950s. Our analysis of the formation of this discourse confirms that the labor union had proposed a gender-biased “family wages” system based on assumptions regarding gender roles as understood in the 1950s. More concretely, there was a proposal to impose gendered differences in the determination of living wages. However, this proposal triggered an intense debate within the union, and ultimately led to the establishment of a wage system without gender bias. An underlying issue impacting the discourse on gender differences in the labor union, which emerged victorious in the human rights strike, was tension between prevailing ideologies of romantic love and the realities facing women who would later return to working communally in a rural agriculture-based society.