| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Andrew Gordon. The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 270.

Modern Japan's industrial workplace is a topic about which Andrew Gordon has written often and well. His earlier books on The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853–1955 (1985) and Labor and Imperial Democracy in Pre-War Japan (1991) analyzed labor and society in the years before World War II. Despite the common image of Japan's cooperative industrial relations and happy consensus, these prize-winning studies highlighted the contested nature of the workplace and the active and creative role of workers in shaping the form of workplace life and the character of industrial relations. Gordon's new book extends that analysis into the postwar years. 1

His focus is on workers in the steel industry. As in his previous studies, Gordon, relying on a wide range of written and oral sources, tells a compelling, thickly textured story of the complex relationship between managers and workers. The first six chapters illuminate what he calls the "contest for the workplace" that dominated the first two decades following the war. Energetic workers and activist unions confronted managers over a wide range of issues including wage-setting procedures, work conditions, and technology organization. Despite efforts to restore or enhance managerial authority, managers remained embattled throughout this period. The commonly discussed cooperativist industrial order was nowhere visible in these tumultuous decades. . . .

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