Decision-Making at the National Level

National industrial federations have become increasingly involved in collective bargaining, although their role is generally still confined to coordination of the policies and activities of their affiliated unions on an industrial level. The national centers such as Sohyo^[*] (General Council of Trade Unions of Japan) and Domei^[*] (Japanese Confederation of Labor) also play an important role in shunto^[*] (the annual "spring wage offensive" for wage increases). Particularly Sohyo, which jointly with Churitsuroren^[*] (Federation of Independent Unions) organizes the Joint Struggle Committee for shunto , is responsible for setting common targets, exchanging information, and organizing a scheduled united drive of affiliated unions which includes mass meetings, demonstrations, slowdowns, and strikes. However, Sohyo and other national centers do not take part in collective bargaining. It has been very rare, at least so far, for Sohyo's^[*] top leaders to meet and negotiate with the prime minister or cabinet ministers to settle a general strike of the transportation and communication industries.

While some of the characteristics of union decision-making described thus far are also applicable to the national centers, the national centers have some unique characteristics of their own, since their function is more political than economic. This is particularly true of Sohyo, which, unlike Domei and Churitsuroren, is composed largely of unions in the public sector—those of national and local civil servants including teachers, and employees of public corporations such as railway, postal service, telecommunications, and national forestry. Union members from the public sector

constitute two-thirds of all Sohyo^[*] membership, and their activities are intrinsically politically oriented, since their employers are government or semi-governmental agencies, which limit or forbid the unions' right to bargain or to strike.

One of Sohyo's^[*] most difficult and controversial decisions is on which political party to support. The decision is simple for Domei^[*] because it is committed to support only the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), but Sohyo's convention must decide whether to support only the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) or two parties—Socialist and Communist. Socialist party supporters have a caucus called the Socialist Party Members Council, which has been able to command the majority position so that they have been called the "mainstream faction." Communist party supporters also have their caucus, and they join with non-Communist leftists to form the "antimainstream faction." In addition, there is another group of unions from private industry which supports the DSP, but this group is of minor importance compared with the other two factions.

In every Sohyo annual convention, open strife takes place on the floor between the two factions over the issue of supporting a political party. In such a highly ideological issue there is no compromise. Unlike the issue of wage increase, the executive officer cannot make the kind of proposal that is accepted by the convention but later actually modified or negated. The choice between the alternatives can only be decided by taking a vote of the delegates to the convention.

The vote is taken in two ways. One is the vote cast by individual delegates, who are allocated to each affiliated organization in accordance with the number of its registered (Sohyo dues-paying) members. In this kind of vote, big organizations with hundreds of thousands of members have the decisive power. The second type of vote is for each affiliated organization to cast one vote as a single unit. This type of vote is designed to counterbalance the power of big unions.

Naturally, the two factions compete with each other in various ways to attract unions and their delegates to their respective sides as effectively as possible. Therefore, this process of decision-making reflects exactly the actual balance of power between political factions within Sohyo. It is difficult to predict what will happen when the vote is ultimately taken on the convention floor. This may be even more true in the near future, since the political situation within Sohyo is supposed to become more complex and unstable.