JAPAN: Strike One

Along with cherry blossoms, spring in Japan brings an annual labor offensive conducted with all the stylized ritual of a tea ceremony. Unions make impossibly high demands; management counters with an unrealistically low offer—and just before a strike is called, the two sides meet somewhere more or less in the middle. But this year, with the economy still muddling along in a recession, management let it be known that it was in no mood for bargaining games, while labor demanded even more than the usual raise as a reward for past years of hard work. Instead of picking a large manufacturer as their strike target, the unions decided to shut down the privately owned commuter-transportation industry.

The result last week was brief but nearly total chaos. The strike lasted only half a day, but during that time Japan's bus lines, airlines, half of all taxicabs and most railways all shuddered to a paralyzed standstill. Instead of resigning themselves to an unexpected holiday, nonstriking Japanese workers viewed the stoppage as a challenge to their ingenuity and set out to reach their jobs by any means possible. Monumental traffic jams stretched for miles. Government-owned trains still ran, but only irregularly, and sometimes arrived at their destination with their windows cracked from passenger pressure. In the crush, commuters lost buttons, clothes, even shoes. One bank clerk reported that "I rode all the way in without my feet once touching the floor."

Both sides had made their point, and negotiations resumed with something resembling good will. Where labor had demanded an average $60-a-month raise—and management had offered only $22—the two sides now settled on a compromise $34 bringing the average Japanese railway worker's wage to about $365. By midafternoon most people had gone back to work. Transportation Minister Koshiro Niwa apologized to the people for all the inconvenience, and Tokyo's traffic returned to its normal state of guided confusion for another year.